To measure the success of state forest institutions the full range of their goals should be considered. As partial evaluations are still dominant a task of a comprehensive performance measuring represents a theoretical and an empirical challenge. In solving this challenge the goals from policy programmes are taken and anchored in the scientific theories. The key question of this paper is the operationalisation of such criteria. For that, the indicators are utilised, which are selected according to the pre-defined quality requirements. By combining these indicators, an ordinal scale ranging from zero (0) to three (3) is designed for each criterion and it is compared how economic, ecological and political goals are met. The applicability of this method is tested on the five state forest institutions in Serbia and Croatia. The main results show that (i) comprehensive evaluation of state forest institutions is empirically feasible, (ii) state forest institutions that manage state-owned forests in Serbia and Croatia are the main pillars of sustainable forestry, whereas (iii) the forest authorities fail in fulfilling most of the goals in private forests. This case study illustrates the added value of taking a broader evaluation approach to ensure that all politically relevant tasks of state forest institutions can be judged fairly. It represents a sound comparison between all types of state forest institutions.