Sabaheta Ramcilovic-Suominen
I was born in 1979 in Dolno Konjare, a small village of about 100 households near to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. I spent my childhood and youth until the age of 24 on the small family farm in Konjare. This part of my life strongly influenced my further vocation and the ever-lasting love for nature.
In 2002 I graduated from the interdisciplinary studies of environmental sciences at the University of Cyril and Methodius in Skopje. As a student, I volunteered in the local non-governmental organisation (NGO) called ‘Proaktiva’ which brought me closer to the social aspects of environmental issues and to the concept of sustainability. In the beginning of 2004, I was hired to be a part of sustainability team of Saipem, an Italian oil and gas company in Milan. After almost two years at Saipem, I gave up my work life in Italy for a student life in Germany, and at the end of 2007 I received my Master’s degree (M.Sc.) in Environmental Governance from the University of Freiburg. Being an EFI scholar during my M.Sc. studies in 2007, I have remained at the EFI ever since; first as a junior researcher working on issues related to non-market forest goods and services, and later as a PhD student.
In my PhD studies I seek to understand the peoples’ motivations to obey or disobey with the forestry laws. In particular, I focus on the values people ascribe to forest and the extent to which these values influence their forest law compliance behaviour. The study builds on the case of forest communities in Ghana, Africa. Shedding light on forest law compliance, the study is meant to produce policy implications for a number of programmes focussing on forest law enforcement, such as the Ghanaian Validation of Legal Timber Programme (VLTP) and the EU Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan.
