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FOREST CERTIFICATION IN COMPLEX SOCIO-POLITICAL SETTINGS

By Michael Richards

This review examines the role of forest certification in forest trade and governance in complex socio-political settings. A large portion of the world's forestland suffers from illegal logging, poor management or no management at all. What is the role of certification in promoting better practice in the difficult areas of the world and what are some of the options for progressing in these areas? Looking at the experience in Latin America, Russia, parts of Southeast Asia and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the review asks:

• What national criteria and indicators can be applied in an imperfect setting to create a credible system of forest certification?
• What potential repercussions do these have on overall forestry sector and government setting and enforcement of standards?
• How does the certification of a limited set of 'responsible' forest operations affect the overall trade in sustainable forest products - including the problem of green washing, the problem of accepting imperfect equity standards for tenure or workers' rights and not being able to change the standards later and of impacts where land tenure and forest tenure rights are not well established.

The review looks at some of the options that have been adopted to evaluate their potential effectiveness as certification moves forward.

Overall certification is still at a rather incipient stage in the tropics due to its cost and other constraints. While North America and Europe have 8.7% and 5.7% of their forest areas certified, respectively, other regions only have about 0.5% of their forest area certified. About 97% of the total certified forest area is in North America and Europe and the total certified forest area is still less than 1% of the world's forests outside protected areas.

Governance impacts
The main positive governance impacts include improved forest management planning and administration (including internal monitoring, evaluation and reporting procedures), increased dialogue with government and other stakeholders, increased acceptance of community representatives in local and national policy fora and, at a more general level, increased company and supply-chain transparency. Certification is helping to stimulate enabling SFM policies, because of its participatory approach to standards development, raising awareness of the potential of SFM, decentralising and democratising the policy processes and providing better policy definition from an interdisciplinary sharing of ideas. In some countries, certification is beginning to take on a voluntary monitoring function of SFM. In Cameroon, Papua New Guinea and Ghana, 'privatised' chain of custody verification mechanisms are emerging which will help enforce forest management and transport regulations.

Trade liberalisation increases the influence of international green market pressures like certification and green procurement policies (as promoted by several European governments). In a more liberalised trading scheme, there are higher returns on certified forest product exports.

Dilemmas
However, various shortcomings in certification and timber procurement initiatives can reduce the likelihood of forest governance benefits in developing and transition economy countries:

• Most forest production is for domestic markets currently disinterested in certification and forest governance problems are more acute in the context of domestic trade.
• If certification focuses primarily of on the easier to certify temperate timber, this may result in a substitution of tropical timber in more discriminating markets and a shifting of the tropical timber exports to less discriminating markets.
• Certification can be inequitable, since its high cost means only large operations can obtain certification, giving them preferential export market access.
• Trade policies and pressures can lead either to a virtuous governance cycle, providing regulatory weaknesses and externalities are tackled, or a downward spiral of illegality where certified companies find it difficult to compete.
• Decentralisation under poor governance simply moves rent-seeking and continued corruption to a more local level.

Barriers
A number of countries demonstrate the complexities of the role that market-based pressures for sustainability place on trade and forest governance. Compliance with the CITES agreement for control of mahogany has been limited to export markets without having a positive impact on the SFM for other products and species. A small number of certified companies in the Amazon have set very positive examples, but these have not led to changes in the incentives in the domestic trade for the majority of companies.

Regional pressures are created by policies in producer and consumer countries. In East Kalimantan, Indonesia, the high demand for logs from Malaysia, China and other countries was fuelling the illegal export trade, in combination with the lack of stability for internal controls. Certification efforts in Indonesia compete with the greater governance pressure created by the China logging ban and the application of higher SFM standards in Malaysia. In Africa, as well, an improvement in forest control in a wealthier country, which can afford to import forest products to meet a domestic market shortfall, increases the environmental and governance pressures in poorer neighbouring countries.

Adjustments
Interesting models are being applied by certified and other buyers seeking timber produced from sustainable sources in complex settings: the Star System, based on percent of product content which complies with the standards, as for recycled content, Ikea's 4-step system, the Nature Conservancy's 'safe wood' model and models of performance-based harvesting. All of these systems aim to support improvements in local governance and encourage improvements in SFM in export trade which also has an impact on domestic trade.

In Russia, investments are being planned in parallel to government efforts to establish minimum standards for forest management, apply better governance and move towards full certification. Certification bodies and donors are promoting modified processes for certification including step-wise approaches and modular certification, rather than attempting to move immediately to an assessment of a forest management operation or chain of custody operation with regard to full compliance with standards and criteria. There are discussions of paralleling certification efforts with the imposition of tracking systems. Bolivia has brought its forest policies line with certification and decentralised enforcement to create positive local incentives for their implementation.

Further information:
Dr E. Michael Richards
Consultant, IIED
Tel. +44 (0)1993 779133 or 778038
emrichards@ntlworld.com

For more information:
http://www.forest-trends.org

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