FAQs
What activities are eligible for PROFOR funding?
PROFOR funds activities that are relevant to the four thematic areas – livelihoods, finance, governance and cross-sectoral cooperation – and have good potential for significant gains in knowledge with high applicability to a wide range of situations.
PROFOR is a multi-donor partnership formed to pursue a shared goal of enhancing forests' contribution to poverty reduction, sustainable development and protection of environmental services. PROFOR supports analytic work, and knowledge management and dissemination of forest issues related to livelihoods, governance, finance and cross sectoral cooperation. Housed within the World Bank Sustainable Development Network's Forests Team, the PROFOR Secretariat closely aligns its work with the objectives of enhancing forests' contribution to poverty reduction, sustainable development, and the provision of environmental services.
PROFOR seeks to develop and support proposals for activities which are consistent with these objectives. The overall forest conservation and development outcomes, the sustainability of the work, and ability to leverage funding are all considerations in proposal development.
What is the procedure for submitting a proposal to PROFOR?
PROFOR's Advisory Board, the World Bank's External Advisory Group, and technical staff in the World Bank, in close consultation and in cooperation with the PROFOR Secretariat, help to identify priority topics for which there is a demand for PROFOR support, and proposals for PROFOR support may be generated by any of these groups or may come directly from a government. Unsolicited proposals from project proponents are not currently being accepted, however, the Secretariat actively welcomes feedback and suggestions in line with its wider dialogue with local and regional stakeholder groups and organizations for activities it might consider supporting. Opportunities for working with PROFOR on some of its activities are outlined in the Opportunities link of its web page. Other opportunities are announced through the on-line publications UN Development Business and WBG e-consult through which Expressions of Interest can be submitted.
What is the relationship between PROFOR and its host organization, the World Bank?
PROFOR is housed at the World Bank because of the synergies between PROFOR's thematic work and the objectives of the World Bank 2002 Forests Strategy – poverty reduction, sustainable economic development, and protection of global forest values. In many cases, PROFOR's analytical work contributes to the Bank's work at the national level by helping to build knowledge needed to inform policy reform process and to share experiences between countries facing similar obstacles within the forest sector. PROFOR has also been able to play a role in catalyzing dialogue on reform in key countries by providing knowledge in a timely manner and convening key stakeholders. Some examples of these synergies include PROFOR's work in Russia, India and Honduras.
What is the relationship between PROFOR and the NFP Facility?
The National Forest Programme Facility (Facility) and the Program on Forests (PROFOR) are two initiatives with a common mandate – to support National Forest Programs (NFPs) or other national forest policy processes. In short, the Facility provides country support to enable governmental and civil society actors to manage and develop NFP processes, whereas PROFOR supports analytical work and generates knowledge in the form of lessons learned and new tools and approaches on key issues within the forest sector, such as forests-poverty linkages. These two distinct yet complimentary roles are the foundation of a two-way partnership between PROFOR and the Facility: the Facility's engagement in many countries throughout the world provides experiences that can help to inform PROFOR's work; and the tools, concepts and approaches generated by PROFOR can help Facility countries in developing and implementing their NFPs. A briefing note on the relationship between the NFP Facility and PROFOR highlights how the two programs work in partnership.
What are the World Bank and PROFOR doing to promote good forest governance and law enforcement?
As part of its mandate for addressing issues related to forest governance, PROFOR is supporting both knowledge generation and on-going fieldwork in the area of forest law enforcement and governance (fleg). For example, as a part of its knowledge generation work, PROFOR is developing indicators and analytic frameworks to help governments and other stakeholders globally to identify best opportunities for forest governance reforms. PROFOR has also supported various studies to improve knowledge about conversion factors of valuable hardwoods in Central America to prevent timber laundering of CITES species. PROFOR has also supported the preparation of national action plans to combat illegal logging prevention in many countries, supported independent forest monitoring and worked with regional organizations like ASEAN to help prevent forest crime. The main approach has been to enable both the generation of knowledge and its use. Often this support is based on the ministerial declarations on forest governance issued in many parts of the world in early-2000s with the support of the World Bank.
PROFOR activities have also been used strategically, to complement World Bank forestry operations and to provide analytic tools related to emerging themes like REDD+ betterto address governance and law enforcement challenges in the forest sector. More information on PROFOR governance work is available on this web-site.
What is the relationship between fleg and FLEGT?
Responding to public concerns about illegal logging, in 2003, the European Commission adopted a European Union (EU) Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT). The key regions and countries targeted under this program are Central Africa, Russia, Tropical South America and Southeast Asia. The FLEGT Action Plan was endorsed by the Council through Conclusions published in November 2003. One essential part of the FLEGT action plan are Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA), and the European Commission has been negotiating these with several countries to limit the flow of illegal timber into Europe.
Neither the World Bank nor PROFOR are official parties to FLEGT or are involved in VPA negotiations. However, the policy objectives of the Bank’s fleg-work and FLEGT are very similar and mutually supporting. PROFOR welcomes the progress made in FLEGT implementation and other national and regional initiatives to promote good forest governance and law enforcement. Our joint efforts are demonstrated also by the fact that the European Commission and several EU member states are key donors of PROFOR (as well as other governance-related trust funds at the Bank.) More information on FLEGT is available here.
