Beyond Forest Expansion: State Forest Land Acquisitions as an Instrument of Sustainable Land Governance

Land-use conflicts in non-urbanized areas are fundamentally governance problems rather than purely environmental ones: sustainability outcomes increasingly depend on integrated, cross-sectoral decision-making reconciling forestry, agriculture, tourism, infrastructure, and urbanization within a finite land resource. This study examines whether statutory land acquisitions by a public forest administration can be understood as such a governance instrument rather than simply forest-area expansion, using an original transaction-level database of 911 land purchases by the Polish State Forests (Lasy Panstwowe) through statutory pre-emption rights between 2022 and mid-2026. The database covers 2806.1 hectares and, for the 903 transactions with a determinable price, approximately 114.2 million PLN. Using descriptive statistics, concentration indices (Gini, Herfindahl–Hirschman), an exploratory hedonic-style log–log regression of unit price on parcel area with location and year fixed effects, and a spatial-autocorrelation analysis (Moran’s I), the study examines spatial concentration, price differentiation, and parcel-size effects. Results show pronounced sub-regional concentration (county-level Gini = 0.615, more than double the voivodeship-level value of 0.284), a systematic price premium for parcels below 0.5 ha, and a dominant role of location over parcel size in explaining price variation (R-squared rising from 0.042 to 0.198 with location fixed effects); these are descriptive associations rather than causal estimates, given the absence of parcel-level quality covariates and a fully specified spatial–econometric model. The findings support interpreting statutory pre-emption purchases as a market-based institutional mechanism contributing to boundary rationalization, ownership consolidation, and mediation of competing land-use pressures, with implications for county-level monitoring and cross-sectoral coordination with spatial planning.