This comparative study examines how 336 purposively recruited respondents in Czechia, Slovakia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam understand and assess the forest bioeconomy. Respondents generally reported stronger familiarity with sustainable forest management and the circular economy than with the bioeconomy itself. Perceptions also varied across country cases, particularly within the Mekong region. A binary logistic regression identified associations between high perceived implementation and country, age, education, understanding of policy aims, support for implementation and positive assessments of forest-industry implementation. These findings describe perceptions within the recruited sample rather than national populations, and the reported associations should not be interpreted as causal effects.
Key findings
- Sustainable forest management was fully understood by 279 of 336 respondents (83.0%), compared with 228 respondents (67.9%) for the circular economy.
- For the bioeconomy, 155 respondents (46.1%) reported full understanding, 112 (33.3%) partial understanding and 69 (20.5%) no understanding, indicating a substantial knowledge gap.
- Understanding differed significantly among the Mekong-region cases (reported p=0.00028). The article reports rates of 60.6% for Thailand, 68.4% for Laos and 17.2% for Vietnam.
- In the fitted model, the Slovakia and Laos country indicators were associated with higher odds of belonging to the high perceived-implementation group (OR 2.31 and 3.12, respectively), relative to the model’s reference categories.
- High perceived implementation was also associated with age above 46 years (OR 1.96), below-tertiary education (OR 2.67), strong understanding of implementation aims (OR 2.23) and high support for implementation (OR 3.55).
- A positive assessment of forest-industry implementation was associated with higher perceived implementation (OR 2.34). Respondents broadly agreed on the importance of forest sectors, and the study found no significant case-level differences for its fourth hypothesis.
Why this matters globally
The study provides an exploratory cross-regional baseline for understanding stakeholder awareness and perceived readiness for forest-bioeconomy policies. Its most transferable implication is that policy support does not necessarily imply a shared understanding of the bioeconomy. Governments and forest-sector organizations may therefore need locally adapted communication, stakeholder education and participation strategies. The evidence is best used for hypothesis generation and program design, not for ranking countries or estimating national public opinion.
Thai researcher contribution
Thailand-affiliated researchers made substantive contributions to the study. Nopparat Kaakkurivaara of Kasetsart University’s Department of Forest Engineering contributed to the investigation, methodology, visualization and original manuscript draft. Alice Sharp and Prasit Wangpakapattanawong of Chiang Mai University’s Forest Restoration Research Unit contributed to data curation and manuscript review and editing. The reported funding sources were Czech and Slovak; no Thai funding source was identified.
Limitations to consider
The study used purposive online recruitment and a stakeholder-oriented sample that was heavily weighted toward tertiary-educated and public-sector respondents. Country samples were unequal, and no population sampling frame or denominator was available. Some stakeholder groups were underrepresented or absent, while online recruitment may have excluded people with limited digital access. Consequently, the findings cannot be generalized to the national populations of the five countries. The cross-sectional design supports associations only, not causal conclusions, and the Advocacy Coalition Framework was interpretive rather than a formal coalition-detection method.