Advancing regional collaboration for optimized impact: The Baltic-Nordic Cluster

Market outreach

Collaboration is at the heart of PEFC and naturally, at the heart of the Collaboration Fund. In 2017, the Fund began supporting our Baltic and Nordic national members as they set up a PEFC cluster to help improve their coordination and cooperation.

At PEFC, we have a long history of our members supporting each other. From long-term members helping new members start their PEFC journey, to better-resourced members helping those with lower budgets.

In the same way we promote group certification as a means of small-forest owners working together to gain certification, our members also work together - sharing their knowledge, increasing their effectiveness and building capacity – enabling them to do more than they could alone.

Baltic–Nordic collaboration

In this spirit, the 2017 Collaboration Fund is supporting a project led by PEFC Denmark that will see all our Baltic and Nordic members come together in order to increase the effectiveness of their joint operations through the creation of a PEFC cluster.

The project will also help to build synergies among these seven members, enabling them to increase the efficiency of their operations within the region.

The initial focus will be on coordinated marketing efforts, with the project partners developing a cluster-based marketing strategy. This will include a gap analysis of sectors, mapping of key companies and coordinated campaigns to approach these companies, and the implementation of joint marketing actions (such as participation in trade fairs).

The project partners will also produce a guide based on their experiences of creating and running a cluster-based approach. The aim of this guide is to share their best practices with other PEFC national members, enabling others within the PEFC alliance to benefit from the project outcomes.

Looking further ahead, the cluster will also map out other potential activities that could be conducted jointly once the project is over.