Forest Governance 2.0: A Primer on ICTs and Governance explores a range of information and communication technology uses, including increasing public participation and bolstering law enforcement and economic efficiency, to improve forest governance. It draws on current and planned initiatives, both from within the sector as well as outside, from secondary sources and country reports from Ghana, Finland and Uganda.
In assessing the ways in which public expenditures are allocated, two questions are relevant: what is money being spent on, and how well is money being spent? PROFOR financed an effort to develop guidelines for carrying out public expenditure reviews in the forest sector. Credible public expenditure reviews should help policymakers and donors better align forest policy and public spending at a time when carbon finance raises the prospect of increased financial flows.
Small and medium forest enterprises (SMFEs) are the norm in most developing countries. They often represent 80-90% of all forest enterprises and more than 50% of formal forest jobs -- plus many more of an informal and seasonal nature. They accrue wealth locally, empower local entrepreneurship, strengthen social networks and engender local social and environmental accountability. But in least developed countries, structures that connect with and support SMFEs and their associations are weak.
It's easy to think the trade-off between forests and agriculture is a lost cause for trees. Didactic charts in a newly published REDD+ manual provide theoretical ground for optimism.
Lessons learned from the first generation of sub-national REDD ‘demonstration activities’ will shape the international REDD mechanism’s ability to promote policies and actions that are equitable and generate the co-benefits, and will have a crucial impact on the design of the second generation of REDD strategies and activities.
An estimated 1.2 billion people rely on forests for some part of their livelihoods. However, the importance of forests is often overlooked in national development processes such as poverty reduction strategies due to inadequate evidence documenting how forests sustain the poor. To build better knowledge on this critical relationship, PROFOR developed a “Poverty-Forests Linkages Toolkit” to facilitate relevant data collection and analysis.
