« Qu’est-ce que la forêt pour moi ? » Éléments émergents pour une typologie des représentations sociales de la forêt par les enfants de l’Union Européenne.

Farcy, Christine [UCL] Matagne, Julie [UCL] Fastrez, Pierre [UCL] De Smedt, Thierry [UCL] Gafo Gomez Zamalloa, Maria [Commission Européenne (DG AGRI)] Feuillat, Claire [Indépendant] Herrezeel, Anne [UCL] et al.[show all]

Nowadays an increasing number of people are living in cities and the post-industrial sector of the economy is occupying a growing space. In this framework, social scientists are observing a shift in the social representation of the forest. While forests are valued for outdoor activities, studies are showing how difficult it is for urbanized people, in particular for youngsters, to understand the usefulness of activities like logging which are seen as “killing trees”, or that the multiple functions of forests are not incompatible. Such a dominating representation often generates conflicts with forest managers and planners. Long considered as symbolic owners of the forest, these professionals should now consider new modes of communication with the society grounded in a better understanding of their audiences’ representations of forests, and tap into their ability to understand complex messages such as those related to forest issues. The paper aims to contribute to this end. It presents the first step of a study of the social representations of the forest by children based on the analysis of drawings. More than 9000 drawings were submitted by children (6 to 10 years old) from 23 countries of the European Union as part of the “What is the forest for me?” A contest, organized in 2013 by DG AGRI of the European Commission. This first exploratory study focuses on a sample of 100 drawings. Based on the principles of grounded theory and categorial content analysis, it aims to identify a set of useful variables to discriminate the types of representation found in the sample. Variables are thematically wide ranging: next to descriptive and graphical ones, some focus on land tenure or on the relationship between people and forests while others are related to child psychology. The study will produce a typology to be further validated on a larger sample. The validated models would help forest professionals to better know their audience and design communication strategies that better take these representations of forests into account.