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Tropical Forest Research Network |
VI LINKING GLOBAL CONSERVATION OBJECTIVES AND LOCAL USE OF FOREST AND WILDLIFE RESOURCES
Globalisation and localisation have improved the mix of actors involved in forest management. Forest management is no longer in the hands of a single entity (whether government, NGO or local community), but increasingly the product of negotiations and joint actions between players at global and local level. On the ground, new partnerships for the protection and co-management of forest resources are being created, involving international donors, government agencies, national and international NGOs, private sector actors, research organisations and communities. These multi-scale and multi-stakeholder partnerships in forest management have the potential to link global conservation objectives with local needs, thus creating synergy. However, they do not automatically eliminate power imbalances and conflicting interests. The following contributions discuss the opportunities and difficulties of reconciling global conservation objectives with local needs, and the ways in which power imbalances and conflicting interests can be overcome.
INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS, CIVIL SOCIETY AND TROPICAL FOREST MANAGEMENT
By Eero Palmujoki
Our review deals with the policies and interaction of the world's major economic organisations - the IMF, World Bank and WTO - with regard to tropical forestry, in particular their policies on civil society's role in sustainable forest management.
We analyse this role from two points of view. First, the multidimensional character of international organisations and possible impacts of these organisations' primary aims are examined. The multidimensional character means that although these international organisations focus on particular issues, such as poverty reduction, they have adopted a broader approach including environmental concerns and sustainable development. This has been evident at the World Bank, but also increasingly at the IMF and the WTO. Second, we scrutinise the role of civil society in the policies and agendas of these international organisations, in particular with respect to the environment and tropical forestry. The first issue that emerges here is that the civil society empowerment model applied by the World Bank, in which the IMF has also engaged through the general discussion with the NGOs, has been applied in the environmental projects of multilateral financial institutions during the last decade. The second issue concerns new market-based mechanisms, for example forest certification which constitutes another important field in which the non-governmental sector and international organisations are interacting. This raises interesting questions regarding sovereignty.
The mechanisms of governance, in which non-governmental actors play visible roles alongside international and governmental agencies, generate new tendencies in international relations. It is justified to characterise these mechanisms of governance as phenomena of international relations for their own sake. It is also possible to speak about the privatisation of international regulations, on the one hand, and about the politicisation of private measures, on the other. In these cases the issue is that the non-governmental players - NGOs and other civil society organisations, business enterprises and local communities - with or without the international organisations, supersede the governmental authorities.
Interestingly enough, these mechanisms are becoming increasingly important for the international governance of forestry. Concerning tropical forests, in particular, new measures emphasise both the tendency of privatisation and politicisation. The politicisation is due to the definitions of sustainable forest management that international organisations and NGOs adopt and the privatisation is partly due to the way these measures are implemented.
The concept of civil
society
The idea of governance derives its concepts from economic liberalism and political
pluralism. Both of them resist strong central government and authority over
citizens. The central concept connecting economic and political aspects of liberal
governance is civil society.
Although the concept of civil society is ambiguous, both multilateral financial institutions and national and international NGOs eagerly implement it. In tropical forestry, four patterns can be identified:
All these patterns reflect changes in international relations as well as in national forest policies in an interesting way. The first two patterns refer primarily to the policies initiated by the international organisation and to a certain extent by the NGOs. They vary from the particular forest projects of multilateral financial institutions, such as the Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest (PPG7) to the link between forestry and the funding and loan conditions of the World Bank and the IMF. These kinds of conditions - although their effectiveness has been criticised - have been recently implemented in the important tropical timber-producing countries of Indonesia and Brazil.
The third and fourth cases refer to forest certification. They differ from the earlier cases because the roles of the international organisations can be more or less responsive and they have not been very active in creating these kinds of regulative mechanisms. Originally the idea of forest certification was put forward by the non-governmental sector, but - as the third pattern shows - there have been significant attempts to create national certification programmes, in which governmental or semi-governmental agencies play important roles.
The way in which these developments and patterns enforce civil society and sustainable forest management is a question of importance. These mechanisms are still so novel that their efficiency for sustainable forest management cannot be clearly proven. Theoretically they have already changed the position of the sovereign state in global environmental governance. Similarly, these developments have enforced non-governmental environmental regulation and these regulations have spread to non-forest sectors, thereby emphasising the politicisation of forestry measures.
Further information:
Eero Palmujoki
Department of Political Science and International Relations
33014 University of Tampere
Finland
E-mail: eero.palmujoki@uta.fi