3.1 Policy framework assessment
BIH is a sovereign state with parliamentary state regulation and a decentralized political and administrative structure. Land and land resources are under exclusive jurisdiction of three administrative units, which include the Republic of Srpska Entity, the Federation of BIH Entity (FBIH) and BrĨko District (BD). FBIH comprises ten cantons with their own governments, legislative and administrative framework (Figure 1b ). There are 13 Ministries of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management MAFWMs in BIH (Agency of statistic BIH, 2017). For each one of the three entities and ten cantons of FBIH, land is under the jurisdiction of the MAFWM. Due to decentralization at the state level, land policy implementation and enforcement takes place at the entity level in RS and BD, and entity and cantons level in FBIH. In BIH, no specific law is devoted to soil protection and, thus, the legislative framework does not recognize land degradation explicitly. The main laws at the Entity level that indirectly address land degradation are listed in Table 2 . Land degradation falls under agriculture, forestry and water legislations, but without a specific legal framework.
In 2017, however, BIH adopted an Action programme to combat land degradation and mitigate drought effects. In FBIH, the implementation of strategic documents and legal acts is complicated by the fact that this entity has ten cantons and each have their own government, policy framework and legislation for land management and environmental and spatial planning. In regards to the local policy framework, current legislation requires local governments to create local strategies on land use planning, but many local communities do not accomplish this task, due to the weak economic situation. With limited budget devoted primarily to solving crrent economic problems. In addition, the existing land use planning system differs between entities and cantons in FBIH. Thus, the complexity of the legislative and strategic framework also creates complexity in approaches and framework implementations.