Deforestation and forest degradation remain huge global environmental challenges. Over the last decades, various forest governance initiatives and institutions have evolved in global response to interlinked topics such as climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, indigenous rights, and trade impacts – accompanied by various levels of academic attention. Using a Delphi methodology that draws on both policy and academic insights, we assess the currently perceived state of play in global forest governance and identify possible future directions. Results indicate that state actors are seen to be key in providing supportive regulatory frameworks, yet interviewees do not believe these will be established at the global scale. Rather, respondents point to issue-specific, regional and inter-regional coalitions of the willing, involving the private sector, to innovate global forest governance. Linking forest issues with high politics may hold promise, as demonstrated by initiatives regarding illegal logging and timber trade. Confident rule-setting in support of the public good as well as responsible investments are seen as further avenues. New forest governance “hypes”, if used strategically, can provide leverage points and resources to ensure sustainability effects on the ground. At the same time, informal markets are often crucial for governance outcomes and need consideration. As such, clarifying tenure in sovereignty-sensitive ways is important, as are innovative ways for inclusive “glocal” decision-making. Lastly, new technologies, big data and citizens’ capacities are identified as potent innovation opportunities, for making global dependencies between consumption, production and deforestation visible and holding players accountable across the value chains.
Tag: governance
Multistakeholder platforms for integrated landscape governance: The case of Kalomo District, Zambia
Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) that bring together a range of actors to collaboratively address land and natural resource governance issues are increasingly common in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the extent to which such platforms effectively harmonise complex social-ecological challenges and deliver improved outcomes is poorly understood. This study examines how MSPs across different scales of governance in Zambia have influenced and facilitated more integrated landscape governance. Based on literature review, policy document analysis and key informant interviews, we found that MSPs vary in form, function, influence and efficacity. Both formal and informal MSPs were found to enhance deliberative governance through the participation of key actors who contribute towards efforts to reconcile diverging and potentially conflicting interests. At the national level, MSPs benefit from broad actor presence and opportunities to lobby for policy and institutional change. Legally instituted MSPs at the district level provide a bridge between national policy development and local resource governance. Meanwhile, informal and formal local-level MSPs are strong in addressing resource conflicts and fostering community coordination and customary rules and regulations. However, local-level MSPs are less successful in influencing policy change due to weak linkages with formal governance institutions. These weak linkages between local and national governance levels have negative downward effects (i.e. poor policy performance and policies not taking root at the local level). We conclude that while MSPs offer the potential to improve stakeholder dialogue, deliberate feedback loops and enhanced linkages with other stakeholders at both district and national levels are needed to achieve more collaborative, equitable and effective landscape governance.
Strengthening decision-making on sustainable agricultural intensification through multi-stakeholder social learning in sub-Saharan Africa
Increasing and competing demands on agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa mean that policy and investment decisions become more complex. Despite growing consensus on the need for sustainable agricultural intensification, there is limited agreement on how to achieve this in practice. Governments and societies face uncertainty and complex choices. This paper explores the potential of Multi-Stakeholder, Social Learning (MSL) approaches, facilitated by National Learning Alliances (NLAs), to improve policy and investment decisions. Comparative evidence from a donor-supported research and learning programme in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia is used in a theory-based evaluation approach to assess the contribution of the NLAs to capacity and practice change amongst individuals, networks and senior decision-makers. Ten outcome cases are explored, including their contribution to systemic changes in the governance of evidence. Key lessons included: the value to decision-makers of engaging with informal networks; importance of combining dialogue, deliberation and experiential learning; the need to create safe spaces in national level MSL processes; the demanding combination of facilitation skills and commitment; and appropriately flexible support. This suggests a need not only for the production of quality research, but crucially support for MSL as a means of contributing to the good governance of evidence and sustainable change.
Powerful actors and their networks in land use contestation for oil palm and industrial tree plantations in Riau
Indonesia has experienced one of the world’s fastest plantation expansions. Plantation growth is indeed an economic solution to meet the market’s needs, but the accompanying environmental damage and social conflict are at odds with sustainability goals. Various actors with interests in land compete with the power they have. The most powerful actors have controlled land use based on their decisions. Accordingly, this paper presents empirical evidence to understand the important role of powerful actors in land-use contestation in oil palm and industrial plantation forests. It focused on analyzing power actors and social networks to help policymakers understand these powerful actors and take steps toward good governance. We conducted a focus group discussion (FGD), field interviews, and observations as well as implemented the actor-centered power (ACP) approach and social networks analysis (SNA). The combination of these two methods aims to improve the ACP approach by explaining how actors form coalitions with one another so that the strongest and most prominent beneficiary actors can be identified. We found that actors at the site level are powerful actors, whereas those with the highest authority in the hierarchy do not have power in land-use control. Village officials are powerful actors, as they are the central figures in the network and mostly use dominant information to weaken other actors. Village officials with strategic positions in the network have the most connections and play a bridging role between actors from different subgroups in the network. Powerful actors who can control the use of natural resources must be involved in determining strategies to improve natural resource governance and implement such a process at the site level.
Key challenges for governing forest and landscape restoration across different contexts
Governance arrangements directly influence decision making processes and the degree to which different stakeholder groups are engaged in planning, implementing, and receiving benefits from Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR). Narrow institutional and agency mandates must be better aligned to permit new ways of governing landscapes that are centered on the needs and capacities of local stakeholders. This special issue highlights challenges and opportunities for governing FLR at different scales and under different contexts across a range of tropical and subtropical forest biomes. In this introductory paper, we explore common threads from diverse studies comprising the special issue to highlight key challenges for effective governance of FLR across many different contexts. We discuss enabling factors and conditions that can help to overcome deficiencies in governance processes and outcomes and illustrate how these conditions are linked to the six principles of FLR. We conclude by emphasizing several gaps in understanding how governance arrangements influence the planning, implementation and monitoring of FLR.
Intensity and embeddedness: Two dimensions of equity approaches in multi-stakeholder forums
This occasional paper presents a new approach to examining how multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) on land use and land-use change address equity. Based on a review of cases in the scholarly literature, we engage with MSFs from two key characteristics: the degree to which an MSF includes local peoples as part of a forest-landscape solution (its intensity), and the degree to which an MSF and/or its goals or objectives are embedded or entangled in wider societal or governmental programs and processes (its embeddedness).
Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) have been positioned as a transformative solution for more sustainable decision making in forestry, land use, and climate change interventions. Yet, we propose that an MSF’s resilience and potential to promote equity is impeded if local peoples are not regarded as key partners rather than ‘beneficiaries’, and if the forum and/or its outcomes are not meaningfully institutionalized.
Intensity and embeddedness are useful analytical tools that go beyond typologies that identify characteristics found in successful MSFs. They are helpful in terms of explaining how different approaches across different contexts function and add nuance to simplified dichotomies. The analytical application of intensity and embeddedness to the analysis of MSFs permits new insights as they describe cases and explain how they differ in terms of equity.
The Governance of Natural Resources: A synthesis of PIM Flagship 5 activities during 2017–2019
The International Food Policy Research Institute’s Policy, Institutions and Markets’ (PIM) Flagship 5 (PIM5), on the Governance of Natural Resources, addresses the policy and institutional foundations for improved management of natural resources, whether held in common or individually. Research in PIM5 investigates where and how tenure insecurity constrains productive and sustainable management of natural resources, and how community groups and individuals who use the same resources in different ways can govern them, with recognition of multiple claims and the preservation of ecosystem services. This synthesis of research findings and outcomes under the flagship, which primarily covers the period 2017-2019, aims to communicate the salience of the flagship’s research to the development agendas of its current and prospective donors and other partners.
Equitable and effective area-based conservation: towards the conserved areas paradigm
In 2018, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted a decision on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). It contains the definition of an OECM and related scientific and technical advice that has broadened the scope of governance authorities and areas that can be engaged and recognised in global conservation efforts. The voluntary guidance on OECMs and protected areas, also included in the decision, promotes the use of diverse, effective and equitable governance models, the integration of protected areas and OECMs into wider landscapes and seascapes, and mainstreaming of biodiversity conservation across sectors. Taken as a whole, the advice and voluntary guidance provides further clarity about the CBD Parties’ understanding of what constitutes equitable and effective area-based conservation measures within and beyond protected areas and provides standardised criteria with which to measure and report areas’ attributes and performance. This policy perspective suggests that this CBD decision represents further evidence of the evolution from the ‘new paradigm for protected areas’ to a broader ‘conserved areas paradigm’ that embodies good governance, equity and effective conservation outcomes and is inclusive of a diversity of contributions to conservation within and beyond protected areas.
¿Cómo vamos? A tool to support more equitable co-management of Peru’s protected areas
Key messages
- Comparative research in four countries has shown that multistakeholder forums (MSFs) are viewed across sectors as a means of fostering a ‘transformational change’ that will address the environmental and social impacts of the climate crisis.
- In Peru, the Protected Areas Service (SERNANP) requires the establishment of management committees (MCs) or MSFs involving various stakeholders in the management of protected areas.
- CIFOR and SERNANP co-developed and tested the tool ¿Cómo vamos? (How are we doing?), which enables participatory
reflective monitoring in MSFs. The tool was tested with eight of SERNANP’s MCs. - Given the positive reception and widespread interest in the tool by stakeholders, SERNANP decided to publish the tool as one of its official documents and to stipulate its annual implementation by the MCs of its 75 protected areas.
- This brief details the findings of an assessment to understand and verify the adoption, outcomes and potential impacts of the tool in Peru.
Implementing forest landscape restoration in Latin America: Stakeholder perceptions on legal frameworks
Legal frameworks could play a key role in enabling countries to meet their ambitious forest landscape restoration (FLR) targets. In this paper, we examine the perceptions of different types of stakeholders from 17 Latin American countries on aspects of forestry and environmental legal frameworks that enable or hamper FLR interventions at the national level. We first reviewed general, environmental, social and financial aspects of existing legal frameworks in order to provide the basis for a mixed qualitative – quantitative analysis of perceptions. The analysis combines information from semi-structured interviews and a Likert-scale questionnaire given to relevant stakeholders involved in implementing FLR interventions in the countries assessed. We interviewed stakeholders from government, academia, national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local private and non-governmental organizations. We found that most legal frameworks are in the jurisdiction of either the agriculture or the environmental sectors. As a whole, we did not find evidence of the kind of legal frameworks articulation needed to enable the coordinated deployment of various forest FLR interventions across landscapes. We found efforts in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico to improve cross-sectorial communication and legislation, and to develop innovative financial mechanisms to support FLR interventions. In general, interviewees had a positive perception of the content of legal frameworks in their countries; however, they highlighted weak implementation capacities, insufficient funding, sectorial and social conflicts, and lack of transparency as key impediments for policy implementation. Academic and NGO stakeholders perceived the content of the legal frameworks more negatively, whereas government officials were more positive. Different perceptions and the prevalence of cross-sectorial conflicts highlight the importance of efforts aimed at improving governance mechanisms and policy integration in the region. In addition, a targeted effort is needed to develop long-term, funding options that are public, private or mixed, and to disseminate information on the importance of FLR interventions for national economies and human well-being. We consider our results as a preliminary overview of the legal environment for FLR implementation in Latin America.