News
13 May, 2013Artisanal logging and legality verification in DRC: what are the options?
FSC certification is not the right instrument to improve forest governance in DR Congo at the moment. This was the conclusion of a network event organised by WWF and the Dutch Tropical Forest Association VTB the 23th of April at the WWF office in Zeist, the Netherlands.
23 April, 2013Frontrunners show the way how to make sustainable forestry business work
Sustainable forestry business is possible and examples of this abound, but to achieve sufficient credibility these business cases need to be scaled up . This was a major message emanating from the side event Good Business: Making Private Investment Work for Forests at the UNFF-10 on April 15 in Istanbul. The side event was jointly organized by World Bank/PROFOR, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für international Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and Tropenbos International.
15 April, 2013Recovering the ancestral interpretation of the Amazon territory
Indigenous communities and territory come together as one, but the relationship implies a variety of visions and interpretations. From a traditional point of view, the territory is multidimensional: it considers not only the physical-geographical area or the political-administrative dimensions, but it also includes the shamanic, mythological and inter-ethnic aspects. These are some of the elements that TBI Colombia recovers in the publication Traditional cartography of the Yucuna-Matapí: The knowledge and management of the traditional territory.
ETFRN News 53: Moving Forward with Forest Governance
General - 2012
ISBN: 978-90-5113-107-9
ISSN: 1876-5866
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.
ETFRN News No. 53, produced by Tropenbos International, has been made possible by the financial assistance of the European Union, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the European Forest Institute’s EU FLEGT Facility, the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Switzerland, and the Government of the Netherlands.