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It is widely acknowledged that improving forest governance is an important prerequisite for sustainable forest management and reducing deforestation and forest degradation. Making governance work better for people and forests is not an easy task. Divergent interests, imbalanced power relations and unequal access to information, decision-making, resources and benefits all contribute to this challenge. The 29 articles in this issue of ETFRN News showcase a rich diversity of examples of how forest governance has been addressed in various settings. The issue brings together experiences from a wide range of forest governance reform initiatives. Some relate to new lessons from well-established approaches to forest governance reform, such as community forestry; others relate to more recently developed initiatives, such as FLEGT. The articles show that international instruments — such as Voluntary Partnership Agreements, forest certification and more recently, REDD+ — are important drivers to address governance in the forest sector. Experiences described in the articles demonstrate that forest governance challenges do not have "one-size-fits-all" solutions. They also show that regardless of the entry point to initiate forest governance reform, there is always a set of underlying inter-related governance issues. Therefore, an integrated process approach is essential to successfully address forest governance reform. The participatory processes of "good" forest governance create the capacity for continuous learning and enhance the ability to adapt to lessons learned. The articles reveal that transparency, communication and access to information, and multi-stakeholder engagement in deliberative processes, particularly the meaningful participation of disadvantaged groups, are essential ingredients in moving forward with forest governance.
Editor: Guido Broekhoven, Herman Savenije and Stefanie von Scheliha
Chainsaw milling, the on-site conversion of logs into lumber using chainsaws, is supplying a large proportion of local timber markets with cheap lumber. While it offers socioeconomic opportunities to local people, it is very often associated with corruption and illegalities. Regulating and controlling the practice is a challenge due to the mobility of these chainsaw milling operations. Domestic timber production and trade are to a large extent unrecorded. Information in this issue of ETFRN News shows that in some countries it represents a high percentage of total timber production, ranging from 30–40% (in Guyana, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo/DRC and Uganda), to more than 50% (in Ghana, Cameroon and Peru), and almost 100% in Liberia. Governments of tropical countries around the world have failed to address the domestic timber demand and struggled to deal with the CSM subsector, which is often informal. International negotiations and agreements on tropical timber production also tend to disregard local timber consumption, although the local timber trade might be affected by these international agreements and vice versa. The European Union (EU) Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) and the (future) climate change agreements (through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD+) might be able to provide incentives to regulate local timber trade. The 28 articles in this issue of ETFRN News cover 20 countries: seven in South America and the Caribbean (section 2); four in Asia (section 3); and nine in Africa (section 4), providing a good overview of the opportunities and challenges of chainsaw milling as a supplier to domestic and regional timber markets. This issue aims to establish the scale and impact of chainsaw milling in the domestic timber trade, and flag it as an important issue to be addressed by national and international forest policies.
Editor: Marieke Wit and Jinke van Dam
The role of logging in the loss and degradation of tropical forest has become an issue of popular concern and political debate across the world. Over the years, the insight has grown that responsible management of forests for timber production may also make a positive contribution to biodiversity conservation. The promotion of socially and ecologically sound forest management through forest certification is now widely embraced as a strategy to conserve the world’s forests and the biodiversity they contain. Approximately 8% of global forest area has been certified under a variety of schemes but in African, Asian and tropical American forests this is less than 2%. Increasing the extent of certification in the tropics remains a goal for many organizations – including some international conservation NGOs. So far, so good, but many details about certification’s effectiveness remain uncertain, including those on biodiversity. In this issue of ETFRN News on Biodiversity conservation in certified forests, a wide variety of authors involved in certification and/or the conservation of tropical forest biodiversity provide their views on the question whether certification is a good conservation strategy for tropical forests. The 33 articles report on practical experiences from concessions and community forests, on the challenges of monitoring biodiversity, high conservation value forests and a range of other subjects. The results of a dedicated on-line survey devised especially for this ETFRN News provide additional context to the views expressed in the articles. The general message that emerges is a positive one, but not without qualifications. Most authors and respondents agree that certification has helped to improve management practices and to conserve forest biodiversity within certified forests in the tropics. However, the true extent of conservation benefits remains unknown due to a lack of rigorous and independent information. Many agreed that certification is not equivalent to full conservation and point at the limitations of certification in reducing deforestation rates. This issue aims to inform and advance debates concerning the role of forest certification in biodiversity conservation, and to stimulate efforts to better demonstrate and explore these.
Editor: Douglas Sheil, Francis E. Putz and Roderick J. Zagt
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