ABSTRACT This study uses the policy regime framework to examine how background conditions, institutions, and actor configurations shaped hunting rights within the forest–wildlife policy domain during Slovenia's postsocialist transformation. Drawing on media analysis, in‐depth interviews with policymakers, and legislative documents, it conducts a detailed process‐tracing analysis of wildlife policy formulation to investigate why private landowners were unable to reclaim their presocialist hunting rights. The analysis shows that a normative consensus around environmental stewardship, reinforced by asymmetric power relations, was a key driver of institutional persistence. In part due to its political learning capacity, the Hunting Association of Slovenia emerged as the dominant actor, supported by center‐left parties, while forest owners remained marginalized. Advocates of state‐controlled hunting successfully aligned their agenda with the prevailing state‐planned wildlife management paradigm and public sentiment, thereby reinforcing continued state ownership of wildlife. The case provides an empirically grounded demonstration of how actor power, institutional structures, and dominant policy ideas can structurally constrain the scope and direction of policy change within governance systems, as observed at the national level, even under conditions of major systemic transformation and in the context of EU accession. The study profiles Slovenia as a normatively conservation‐oriented policy context, in which European norms of “civilized” governance were mobilized to legitimize state control, while market‐oriented or privatized governance models lack political legitimacy.
Šinko et al. (Sat,) studied this question.