Various global initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Global Biodiversity Framework, and Green Deal policies, now demand transformative actions to meet biodiversity and climate targets. Forests remain in the midst of the contested policy goals and inevitable trade-offs among policy instruments. Forest Genetic Resources (FGR) and their related forest reproductive materials (FRM) are of key importance for ensuring biodiversity and fostering the resilience of forest ecosystems. New restoration initiatives (e.g. 3 Billion trees) bring an increasing need for appropriate and sufficient FRM. Despite efforts like EUFORGEN (2021) to ensure sustainable FGR conservation and management, the integration of concepts of FGR and FRM in European policies remains uneven and often implicit on the pan-European, European, and country levels. So, the conservation and deployment of FGR and FRM remain faced with numerous gaps, including under-recognition, weak horizontal coordination, poor vertical integration, insufficient financing, and lack of political will. Studies rarely apply system perspectives and do not focus on identifying policy gaps that hamper FGR and FRM deployment. Even fewer studies address the transformative potential of specific policy instruments to overcome FGR and FRM policy gaps and deploy their full potential on national and local levels.Our research, part of the Horizon Europe project OptFORESTS, addresses this gap by examining how existing and upcoming European policies address FGR and FRM and applying them to Italy and Slovenia. Grounded in system theories and polycentric environmental governance, our approach involves desktop research, content analysis, and expert interviews in a policy gap analysis (PGA). Through policy mapping, we identified over 30 policies influencing FGR and FRM, categorising them into eight policy domains and highlighting inconsistencies within and among these domains. We also observed that European policies are translated to national levels at a ratio of at least 1:3, indicating increasing complexity as we move from pan-European to national and local levels.< Leer menos