IUFRO Spotlight #39 – Governments Reclaiming Role in Forest Certification
Many governments are reclaiming a role that had been pretty well ceded to ENGOs and other private organizations over the past few decades – state governance of forest certification.
According to the authors of From governance to government: The strengthened role of state bureaucracies in forest and agricultural certification, this has become more noticeable following the recent rise of state-driven schemes for certifying timber legality as well as palm oil production in places such as Indonesia.
Their report sums up findings from a variety of recent studies and suggests, they say, that public administrations are beginning to reclaim certification authority through state-led mandatory schemes as part of a trend away from “transnational private governance to international state-driven governance.” Read more…
Spotlight #16 – You’ve got an issue? We’ve got options.
You’ve got an issue? We’ve got options.
Over the last 30 years practitioners and scholars have been dealing with a range of interventions designed to improve global forest management. These included criteria and indicators (C&I), forest certification and, more recently, legality verification and REDD+, to name but a few.
Despite these well intended efforts, frustration exists about their impacts on the ground when addressing deforestation, forest degradation, carbon emissions, and improving the livelihoods of forest dependent people.
Often, potentially transformative interventions are “abandoned” prematurely and replaced by new interventions as stakeholders “learn” about limited results on the ground.
How might learning be developed that might help nurture enduring institutions capable of addressing such thorny challenges?