20.500.12556/RUL-184709 Everything changed, yet hunting rights did not formulation of wildlife property rights in postsocialist Slovenia This study uses the policy regime framework to examine how background conditions, institutions, and actor configurationsshaped hunting rights within the forest–wildlife policy domain during Slovenia's postsocialist transformation. Drawing onmedia analysis, in-depth interviews with policymakers, and legislative documents, it conducts a detailed process-tracing analysisof wildlife policy formulation to investigate why private landowners were unable to reclaim their presocialist hunting rights. Theanalysis shows that a normative consensus around environmental stewardship, reinforced by asymmetric power relations, was akey driver of institutional persistence. In part due to its political learning capacity, the Hunting Association of Slovenia emergedas the dominant actor, supported by center-left parties, while forest owners remained marginalized. Advocates of state-controlledhunting successfully aligned their agenda with the prevailing state-planned wildlife management paradigm and public senti-ment, thereby reinforcing continued state ownership of wildlife. The case provides an empirically grounded demonstration ofhow actor power, institutional structures, and dominant policy ideas can structurally constrain the scope and direction of policychange within governance systems, as observed at the national level, even under conditions of major systemic transformationand in the context of EU accession. The study profiles Slovenia as a normatively conservation-oriented policy context, in whichEuropean norms of “civilized” governance were mobilized to legitimize state control, while market-oriented or privatized gov-ernance models lack political legitimacy. forest policy hunting rights institutional persistence policy regimes postsocialist transition wildlife governance true false true Angleški jezik Ni določen Članek v reviji 2026-07-14 10:16:19 2026-07-14 10:16:27 2026-07-15 03:31:25 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2026 0 0 Str. issue Vol. 2026 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 2026-07-11 630*15 1756-932X 10.1002/eet.70119Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 284685827 https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.nukweb.nuk.uni-lj.si/doi/10.1002/eet.70119 1 242526fe-7f5c-11f1-9b0d-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=237666 Fakulteta za družbene vede 0 0 0