CONTEXT

In collaboration with the World Bank, with financial support from PROFOR, this FAO-led activity aims to develop guidelines for forest concession and construct lessons learned and best practices, building on FAO’s Forest Concession Initiative (FCI), while capturing trends and needs brought up by new realities, such as climate change strategies and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The results of the activity are aimed to benefit national and subnational forest management and land use planning agencies, community forest managers and other international NGOs and forest management stakeholders.

CHALLENGE

Forest concessions are an important instrument used for allocating public forests to a private entity. It is used as a contract to establish the rights to harvest in a given forest area and regulate responsibilities, prices, incentives and sanctions of the government and the concession holder. Most typically, forest concessions are granted to companies, but there are also cases of concessions granted to communities. Forest concessions are adopted in all parts of the world, especially in and tropical forests, and are an important tool for sustainable forest management (SFM), especially considering that the majority of forests in tropical forests are public. Forest concessions, which can be granted through different contractual arrangements, can enable a wide range of socioeconomic benefits, such as security of tenure, increased income, access to social services and local development.

Forest concessions have the potential to be instrumental in achieving progress towards the SDGs, especially by creating more sustainable terrestrial ecosystems that can alleviate poverty, and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaption. Despite these potential benefits, results from forest concessions in tropical forests remain dismal, constrained by weak local governance and global timber market failure to reward sustainable forest management.

In the FAO-led Forest Concession Initiative (FCI), results suggest that forest concessions are very heterogeneous and have been implemented to respond to different, and not always clear, policy objectives, and most typically in weak governance environments. As a result, forest concessions are often perceived negatively and are often associated as being drivers of forest degradation and social inequality. Questions also remain about their financial and economic feasibility. The FCI points to the need of building on lessons learned from the experience with forest concessions in tropical forests to inform the processes in allocating public production forests. This program, therefore, follows up on FCI’s results by developing guidelines for forest concessions, building on lessons learned and best practices, while capturing trends and needs brought up by new realities, such as climate change strategies, the SDGs and the countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

APPROACH

This activity will be led by FAO, in collaboration with PROFOR, by conducting the following tasks:

• Analytical framework with a typology of forest concessions, including policy objectives, legal aspects and contractual arrangements, scope of forest management (objectives and activities), main stakeholders, and monitoring and evaluation.
• Conduct surveys targeting a wide range of stakeholders from the public and private sectors including concessionairis, community organizations, policy makers, private sector bodies involved in forest concessions and alternative allocations models to help identify enabling conditions for effective management of public production forests in tropical countries and to investigate forest concession’s contribution to achieving the SDGs and NDCs.
• Stakeholder review and validation workshops that target the three focus regions—West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America—and bring the key stakeholders together to discuss, validate and further elaborate the draft framework principles and guidelines.
• Final guidelines and publication.

RESULTS

The final report was launched in May 2018 and is available here and from the FAO website.

CHALLENGE

Access to markets is fundamental to the goal of improving livelihood security for a growing number of micro entrepreneurs in the forest produce domain. But this access depends on efficient service delivery which in turn relies on useful and complete information provision to micro entrepreneurs.

APPROACH

As part of the Forest Connect alliance, the Forest Enterprise Information Exchange (FEINEX) initiative is evaluating the processes and systems that enhance efficiency in the agricultural SME sector.  It will then incorporate and adapt lessons to enable increased profits – economic and ecological -- for the forest enterprise sector.

The project will generate three databases 1) a portfolio of services offered by the agriculture service extension system of the central and state governments, 2) a plant disease outbreak and management information database, and 3) a stakeholder database of current service providers and intermediaries.

In addition to creating its own communications and sharing platform, FEINEX is sharing lessons learnt through the Forest Connect alliance.

RESULTS

With PROFOR support, an Indian non-profit organization called Community Enterprise Forum International (CEFI) produced in 2010 a database of 7,000 small and medium scale forest enterprises (SMFEs) and service providers that is helping link enterprises to markets, service providers and policy processes in the Indian states of Orissa, Maharshtra, Tamil Ndu, Uttarakhand, Kerala and Chhattisgarh.

The size of the database largely exceeded initial estimates as interest from SMFEs escalated. The database includes more than 1,000 non-timber forest product gatherers, classified and categorized by the species they usually collect.

CHALLENGE

Access to markets is fundamental to the goal of improving livelihood security for a growing number of micro entrepreneurs in the forest produce domain. But this access depends on efficient service delivery which in turn relies on useful and complete information provision to micro entrepreneurs.

APPROACH

As part of the Forest Connect alliance, the Forest Enterprise Information Exchange (FEINEX) initiative is evaluating the processes and systems that enhance efficiency in the agricultural SME sector.  It will then incorporate and adapt lessons to enable increased profits – economic and ecological -- for the forest enterprise sector.

The project will generate three databases 1) a portfolio of services offered by the agriculture service extension system of the central and state governments, 2) a plant disease outbreak and management information database, and 3) a stakeholder database of current service providers and intermediaries.

In addition to creating its own communications and sharing platform, FEINEX is sharing lessons learnt through the Forest Connect alliance.

RESULTS

With PROFOR support, an Indian non-profit organization called Community Enterprise Forum International (CEFI) produced in 2010 a database of 7,000 small and medium scale forest enterprises (SMFEs) and service providers that is helping link enterprises to markets, service providers and policy processes in the Indian states of Orissa, Maharshtra, Tamil Ndu, Uttarakhand, Kerala and Chhattisgarh.

The size of the database largely exceeded initial estimates as interest from SMFEs escalated. The database includes more than 1,000 non-timber forest product gatherers, classified and categorized by the species they usually collect.

CHALLENGE

Access to markets is fundamental to the goal of improving livelihood security for a growing number of micro entrepreneurs in the forest produce domain. But this access depends on efficient service delivery which in turn relies on useful and complete information provision to micro entrepreneurs.

APPROACH

As part of the Forest Connect alliance, the Forest Enterprise Information Exchange (FEINEX) initiative is evaluating the processes and systems that enhance efficiency in the agricultural SME sector.  It will then incorporate and adapt lessons to enable increased profits – economic and ecological -- for the forest enterprise sector.

The project will generate three databases 1) a portfolio of services offered by the agriculture service extension system of the central and state governments, 2) a plant disease outbreak and management information database, and 3) a stakeholder database of current service providers and intermediaries.

In addition to creating its own communications and sharing platform, FEINEX is sharing lessons learnt through the Forest Connect alliance.

RESULTS

With PROFOR support, an Indian non-profit organization called Community Enterprise Forum International (CEFI) produced in 2010 a database of 7,000 small and medium scale forest enterprises (SMFEs) and service providers that is helping link enterprises to markets, service providers and policy processes in the Indian states of Orissa, Maharshtra, Tamil Ndu, Uttarakhand, Kerala and Chhattisgarh.

The size of the database largely exceeded initial estimates as interest from SMFEs escalated. The database includes more than 1,000 non-timber forest product gatherers, classified and categorized by the species they usually collect.

PROGRAM SUMMARY

The development objective of this programmatic activity is to deepen knowledge on and build capacity to develop practical approaches to strengthening forest governance through the creation of joint knowledge products between the Governance Global Practice (GGP) and the Program on Forests (PROFOR). This knowledge creation was a result of PROFOR’s Forest Governance Monitoring and Assessment: A Program of Dissemination, Learning and Implementation and seeks to leverage good governance principles and multi-sector approaches in the World Bank Group’s (WBG) forest administration and management portfolio.

CHALLENGE

Forest governance is critical to the sustainable and equitable management of forests and landscapes and to enabling poverty reduction and shared prosperity through thoughtful stewardship and use of forest resources. Resource mismanagement, illegal logging, and endemic corruption and bribery pose daunting challenges to forest-rich countries (Sundström 2016, Kishor and Damania 2007). Illegal and illicit logging is estimated to cost developing countries approximately US$5 billion per year in lost timber revenues (Haken 2011; Goncalves et al. 2012), while also marginalizing resource-dependent communities.

Improving forest governance–through strengthening institutional capacity, clarifying policy and legal frameworks, promoting transparency and accountability, and ensuring stakeholder and private sector participation—is a central tenet of the World Bank’s forest strategy and a cross-cutting theme of its Forest Action Plan (FAP) for FY2016-2020. This builds on the foundational work of the Program on Forests (PROFOR) to develop a common framework of principles and criteria for assessing and monitoring forest governance, which has been used as a tool for diagnosing problems, identifying priority reforms and tracking progress of reform efforts across several countries. In line with the principles of the framework and lessons learned from WBG forestry operations, the FAP identifies areas of forest governance where the WBG has a comparative advantage and can further support client countries in advancing on this agenda, including: improving the policy and regulatory framework; strengthening institutions and implementation of policies; enhancing monitoring systems; and supporting mobilization and management of public resources for forestry. The challenge is now ensuring that the WBG has the requisite knowledge, operational tools and capabilities to effectively deliver on these priorities.

APPROACH

Based on consultations with governance and forestry operational staff to identify areas in which closer integration of forestry and governance work would generate increased environmental and economic benefits for national governments and forest-dependent communities, this program will provide advisory services and analytics (ASA) work and project implementation support under seven pillars.

Pillar 1 - Community-based Forestry Management: This pillar aims to further understand how and why Community Forest Management (CFM) succeeds or fails to fully deliver on its potential. This calls for a systematic study of the actual ways CFM is practiced on the ground, with the aim of better understanding the nature of the problems it raises, the kinds of solutions that have locally been experimented with and/or and successfully applied, and the conditions for their possible generalization.

Pillar 2: Financial Management and Governance of Forest Funds: The pillar aims to strengthen knowledge and practical guidance, based on greater cross-country understanding of challenges and successful experiences, to design and implement financial management and governance arrangements of national forest funds.

Pillar 3: Civil Service Reform: The accountability, motivation, and skills of forest management staff and agencies are key to ensuring that forest resources are effectively administered and monitored. This pillar seeks to diagnose the main personnel-related challenges to effective forest governance, and to identify reforms to improve organizational and human resource management that can be implemented through new and on-going WBG-funded forestry lending operations.

 Pillar 4: Public Expenditure Reviews and Domestic Resource Mobilization: This pillar will focus on the design of fiscal regimes in the forestry sector and the ways in which forest revenues are collected, accounted for, and reported.

 Pillar 5: Smart Regulation for Better Markets and Private Sector Participation: This pillar will focus on regulatory management issues related to private sector participation in forestry, and, in particular, how tools to improve regulatory predictability, effectiveness and quality used successfully in other sectors can also be applied to sustainable forestry.

Pillar 6: Country Programs: This pillar is designed to support and complement the preceding 6 pillars by supporting demand-led country efforts to improve governance in forest and related sectors. Activities and expected outputs will include a mixture of research, knowledge creation, dissemination and skills-enhancement. Drawing from available evidence, country case studies and WBG operational experiences, activities will aim to identify common challenges, lessons learned and good practices at the country level and across countries, with a focus on the sequence of reforms, managing implementation, and shaping efforts to align with relevant and related complementary reforms. Findings will be shared as practical guidance and recommendations for WBG-funded operations as well as through knowledge exchange events. To the extent possible, the research will chart a course for future work by identifying areas in which closer integration of forestry and regulatory governance tools would generate increased benefits for national governments, the private sector and forest-dependent communities, and by establishing links to ongoing or pipeline WBG operations. Through Pillar 6, the GGP-PROFOR Partnership will also create mechanisms for engagement at the country and global levels.

Pillar 7: Knowledge Management and Exchange: This pillar will focus on promoting the knowledge generated through the other pillars.

The distinct pillars were purposefully designed to lend the governance lens to specific issue areas within forest governance where there is growing client demand. The program will generate evidence-based knowledge products while also providing technical support to ongoing operations to generate new tools, approaches and solutions to persistent challenges in forest governance.

RESULTS

The activity has concluded, with the following outputs:

• Design Matters: CBNRM and Democratic Innovation

Community-based natural resource management (CBRNM) aims to realize sustainable management of resources and improvements in livelihood. A central focus is the empowerment of indigenous and local communities through customary or devolved rights to common pool resources. Less attention is given to the extent to which inclusive forms of governance are realized in CBNRM. Democratic innovations are institutions designed explicitly to increase and deepen citizen participation in political decision-making. A number of exemplary cases around the world provide evidence that it is possible to empower citizens in ways that are inclusive and achieve desirable outcomes such as redistribution, recognition of marginalized groups, and improved livelihoods. By clarifying elements of the design of democratic innovations - in particular goods, tasks, mechanisms, and co-design - it is possible to understand how effective forms of participatory governance can be crafted. With careful attention to the endogenous practices of indigenous and local communities and the governance structures imposed by public authorities, CBNRM practitioners can draw on these elements of democratic design to craft forms of inclusive participatory governance that promote sustainable management of resources and improve livelihoods. A program of collaboration between CBNRM and democratic innovations practitioners will contribute to improvements amongst both communities of practice and the communities they serve.

• Liberia Forestry Development Authority: An Institutional Capacity Assessment

This report presents the findings from an institutional capacity assessment of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) based on a survey of FDA employees. The FDA plays a pivotal role in managing Liberia’s forest resources, and its Strategic Plan (2018–2030) prioritizes institutional strengthening for achieving its vision of “sustainable forestry for sustainable development.” The FDA employee survey was conducted to provide scientific evidence on the main organizational and personnel dimensions of institutional capacity, including staff skills, management practices, staff attitudes and behaviors, experiences of corruption and undue political interference, stakeholder interaction, and factors determining project success. A total of 438 FDA employees, or approximately 82 percent of the staff, were interviewed, and the sample covered Monrovia and the field offices.

• Mobilizing and Managing Public Forestry Revenue

This paper considers the potential for improvements in forestry revenue management to complement other efforts toward sustainable forest management and to strengthen domestic resource mobilization. It describes forestry management as an extreme version of a classic principal-agent problem, which manifests itself in high levels of corruption, illegality, and revenue leakage at the country level. To address these challenges, the paper proposes that governments adopt a three-tiered sectoral planning process with an appropriately long time horizon, reflecting the length of forest life cycles and the uniqueness of the sector given forests’ status as a renewable natural resource providing essential public goods. Building on a sound planning process, the paper recommends mainstreaming attention to revenue-related issues throughout sectoral management by improving data availability, increasing transparency and stakeholder engagement, and implementing a robust revenue management system. It suggests a set of key revenue management components and institutional principles that can be applied to the local context as appropriate, with the aid of a questionnaire developed to help governments assess current strengths and weaknesses. These approaches may enable governments to improve decision making on land use, protect financial and physical resources that rightfully belong to the citizenry, and strengthen the rule of law in a sector often plagued by its abuse. 

• Regulatory Tools, Effective Markets, and Private Sector Participation in the Forestry and Wood Products Processing Sectors : Issues and Solutions for Developing Countries

This report presents a framework for strengthening the effectiveness and efficiency of regulation of forestry and related sectors. It strives to identify and reduce regulatory burdens on private firms active in the forestry sector, while not compromising the objectives of government regulation. Illegal logging and deforestation, especially in developing countries, has significant impact on national and global forestry product markets, leading to increasingly heavy regulation of forestry sectors-including downstream markets and processing industries. Heavy regulation places a disproportionate burden on SMEs and frequently leads to regulatory failures, including corruption and reduced competition. As a result, many small-scale forestry and downstream private firms cannot comply with regulatory requirements, and instead operate informally. Reduced regulatory compliance leads to a failure to achieve intended and important social, economic, and environmental outcomes. The report is the first to assess the forestry sector from a cross-cutting global regulatory governance perspective. It draws upon and synthesizes key thematic issues and lessons from available materials on forestry, and develops practical solutions based on problem-driven adaption and good practices documented in regulatory governance literature. Based on this, it also creates a framework and toolkit using a selected and appropriate regulatory governance reform tools for application and further development.

PROGRAM SUMMARY

The development objective of this programmatic activity is to deepen knowledge on and build capacity to develop practical approaches to strengthening forest governance through the creation of joint knowledge products between the Governance Global Practice (GGP) and the Program on Forests (PROFOR). This knowledge creation was a result of PROFOR’s Forest Governance Monitoring and Assessment: A Program of Dissemination, Learning and Implementation and seeks to leverage good governance principles and multi-sector approaches in the World Bank Group’s (WBG) forest administration and management portfolio.

CHALLENGE

Forest governance is critical to the sustainable and equitable management of forests and landscapes and to enabling poverty reduction and shared prosperity through thoughtful stewardship and use of forest resources. Resource mismanagement, illegal logging, and endemic corruption and bribery pose daunting challenges to forest-rich countries (Sundström 2016, Kishor and Damania 2007). Illegal and illicit logging is estimated to cost developing countries approximately US$5 billion per year in lost timber revenues (Haken 2011; Goncalves et al. 2012), while also marginalizing resource-dependent communities.

Improving forest governance–through strengthening institutional capacity, clarifying policy and legal frameworks, promoting transparency and accountability, and ensuring stakeholder and private sector participation—is a central tenet of the World Bank’s forest strategy and a cross-cutting theme of its Forest Action Plan (FAP) for FY2016-2020. This builds on the foundational work of the Program on Forests (PROFOR) to develop a common framework of principles and criteria for assessing and monitoring forest governance, which has been used as a tool for diagnosing problems, identifying priority reforms and tracking progress of reform efforts across several countries. In line with the principles of the framework and lessons learned from WBG forestry operations, the FAP identifies areas of forest governance where the WBG has a comparative advantage and can further support client countries in advancing on this agenda, including: improving the policy and regulatory framework; strengthening institutions and implementation of policies; enhancing monitoring systems; and supporting mobilization and management of public resources for forestry. The challenge is now ensuring that the WBG has the requisite knowledge, operational tools and capabilities to effectively deliver on these priorities.

APPROACH

Based on consultations with governance and forestry operational staff to identify areas in which closer integration of forestry and governance work would generate increased environmental and economic benefits for national governments and forest-dependent communities, this program will provide advisory services and analytics (ASA) work and project implementation support under seven pillars.

Pillar 1 - Community-based Forestry Management: This pillar aims to further understand how and why Community Forest Management (CFM) succeeds or fails to fully deliver on its potential. This calls for a systematic study of the actual ways CFM is practiced on the ground, with the aim of better understanding the nature of the problems it raises, the kinds of solutions that have locally been experimented with and/or and successfully applied, and the conditions for their possible generalization.

Pillar 2: Financial Management and Governance of Forest Funds: The pillar aims to strengthen knowledge and practical guidance, based on greater cross-country understanding of challenges and successful experiences, to design and implement financial management and governance arrangements of national forest funds.

Pillar 3: Civil Service Reform: The accountability, motivation, and skills of forest management staff and agencies are key to ensuring that forest resources are effectively administered and monitored. This pillar seeks to diagnose the main personnel-related challenges to effective forest governance, and to identify reforms to improve organizational and human resource management that can be implemented through new and on-going WBG-funded forestry lending operations.

 Pillar 4: Public Expenditure Reviews and Domestic Resource Mobilization: This pillar will focus on the design of fiscal regimes in the forestry sector and the ways in which forest revenues are collected, accounted for, and reported.

 Pillar 5: Smart Regulation for Better Markets and Private Sector Participation: This pillar will focus on regulatory management issues related to private sector participation in forestry, and, in particular, how tools to improve regulatory predictability, effectiveness and quality used successfully in other sectors can also be applied to sustainable forestry.

Pillar 6: Country Programs: This pillar is designed to support and complement the preceding 6 pillars by supporting demand-led country efforts to improve governance in forest and related sectors. Activities and expected outputs will include a mixture of research, knowledge creation, dissemination and skills-enhancement. Drawing from available evidence, country case studies and WBG operational experiences, activities will aim to identify common challenges, lessons learned and good practices at the country level and across countries, with a focus on the sequence of reforms, managing implementation, and shaping efforts to align with relevant and related complementary reforms. Findings will be shared as practical guidance and recommendations for WBG-funded operations as well as through knowledge exchange events. To the extent possible, the research will chart a course for future work by identifying areas in which closer integration of forestry and regulatory governance tools would generate increased benefits for national governments, the private sector and forest-dependent communities, and by establishing links to ongoing or pipeline WBG operations. Through Pillar 6, the GGP-PROFOR Partnership will also create mechanisms for engagement at the country and global levels.

Pillar 7: Knowledge Management and Exchange: This pillar will focus on promoting the knowledge generated through the other pillars.

The distinct pillars were purposefully designed to lend the governance lens to specific issue areas within forest governance where there is growing client demand. The program will generate evidence-based knowledge products while also providing technical support to ongoing operations to generate new tools, approaches and solutions to persistent challenges in forest governance.

RESULTS

The activity has concluded, with the following outputs:

• Design Matters: CBNRM and Democratic Innovation

Community-based natural resource management (CBRNM) aims to realize sustainable management of resources and improvements in livelihood. A central focus is the empowerment of indigenous and local communities through customary or devolved rights to common pool resources. Less attention is given to the extent to which inclusive forms of governance are realized in CBNRM. Democratic innovations are institutions designed explicitly to increase and deepen citizen participation in political decision-making. A number of exemplary cases around the world provide evidence that it is possible to empower citizens in ways that are inclusive and achieve desirable outcomes such as redistribution, recognition of marginalized groups, and improved livelihoods. By clarifying elements of the design of democratic innovations - in particular goods, tasks, mechanisms, and co-design - it is possible to understand how effective forms of participatory governance can be crafted. With careful attention to the endogenous practices of indigenous and local communities and the governance structures imposed by public authorities, CBNRM practitioners can draw on these elements of democratic design to craft forms of inclusive participatory governance that promote sustainable management of resources and improve livelihoods. A program of collaboration between CBNRM and democratic innovations practitioners will contribute to improvements amongst both communities of practice and the communities they serve.

• Liberia Forestry Development Authority: An Institutional Capacity Assessment

This report presents the findings from an institutional capacity assessment of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA) based on a survey of FDA employees. The FDA plays a pivotal role in managing Liberia’s forest resources, and its Strategic Plan (2018–2030) prioritizes institutional strengthening for achieving its vision of “sustainable forestry for sustainable development.” The FDA employee survey was conducted to provide scientific evidence on the main organizational and personnel dimensions of institutional capacity, including staff skills, management practices, staff attitudes and behaviors, experiences of corruption and undue political interference, stakeholder interaction, and factors determining project success. A total of 438 FDA employees, or approximately 82 percent of the staff, were interviewed, and the sample covered Monrovia and the field offices.

• Mobilizing and Managing Public Forestry Revenue

This paper considers the potential for improvements in forestry revenue management to complement other efforts toward sustainable forest management and to strengthen domestic resource mobilization. It describes forestry management as an extreme version of a classic principal-agent problem, which manifests itself in high levels of corruption, illegality, and revenue leakage at the country level. To address these challenges, the paper proposes that governments adopt a three-tiered sectoral planning process with an appropriately long time horizon, reflecting the length of forest life cycles and the uniqueness of the sector given forests’ status as a renewable natural resource providing essential public goods. Building on a sound planning process, the paper recommends mainstreaming attention to revenue-related issues throughout sectoral management by improving data availability, increasing transparency and stakeholder engagement, and implementing a robust revenue management system. It suggests a set of key revenue management components and institutional principles that can be applied to the local context as appropriate, with the aid of a questionnaire developed to help governments assess current strengths and weaknesses. These approaches may enable governments to improve decision making on land use, protect financial and physical resources that rightfully belong to the citizenry, and strengthen the rule of law in a sector often plagued by its abuse. 

• Regulatory Tools, Effective Markets, and Private Sector Participation in the Forestry and Wood Products Processing Sectors : Issues and Solutions for Developing Countries

This report presents a framework for strengthening the effectiveness and efficiency of regulation of forestry and related sectors. It strives to identify and reduce regulatory burdens on private firms active in the forestry sector, while not compromising the objectives of government regulation. Illegal logging and deforestation, especially in developing countries, has significant impact on national and global forestry product markets, leading to increasingly heavy regulation of forestry sectors-including downstream markets and processing industries. Heavy regulation places a disproportionate burden on SMEs and frequently leads to regulatory failures, including corruption and reduced competition. As a result, many small-scale forestry and downstream private firms cannot comply with regulatory requirements, and instead operate informally. Reduced regulatory compliance leads to a failure to achieve intended and important social, economic, and environmental outcomes. The report is the first to assess the forestry sector from a cross-cutting global regulatory governance perspective. It draws upon and synthesizes key thematic issues and lessons from available materials on forestry, and develops practical solutions based on problem-driven adaption and good practices documented in regulatory governance literature. Based on this, it also creates a framework and toolkit using a selected and appropriate regulatory governance reform tools for application and further development.

CHALLENGE

Key features of good governance include adherence to the rule of law, transparency, inputs of all stakeholders in decision-making, accountability of all officials, low regulatory burden, and political stability. While it is widely agreed that good governance in the forest sector is an essential requirement for sustainable forest management, there is much less agreement on what comprises good forest governance and how to distinguish good from poor forest governance. Nevertheless, recent years have seen careful research and serious thinking on these issues, which has moved the international community of practice to a point of relatively robust agreement regarding the scope of what constitutes good forest governance and how to measure the quality of forest governance in a specific setting. However, the challenge that the international community faces is that the knowledge on the what of forest governance has not been widely and effectively disseminated, nor has the how of forest governance been piloted and implemented as extensively as the expected benefits to such application would merit. Without such a consolidated information base, countries are hampered in their ability to undertake steps to apply good governance and assessments to achieving sustainable forest management (SFM). This activity seeks to address these shortcoming.

APPROACH

The activities included in this program are organized under two pillars:

(i) Dissemination, knowledge sharing and skills enhancement:

• Translation of the 2014 publication of Assessing Forest Governance: A Practical Guide to Data Collection, Analysis, and Use, also called the “Assessment Guide,” into Spanish and French. This Assessment Guide will provide the foundation in which to develop the other listed products.
• Webinars
• E-learning course
• Bite-sized learning products (blogs, podcasts)
• Outreach (e.g. international conferences)

(ii) Initiating and improving action in countries: The team will support advanced country-specific training and implementation of measurement approaches that empower countries to embed forest governance in operations, improving their effectiveness and creating additional investment opportunities in the sector. 

RESULTS

This activity has been completed. Results include the following:

Pillar I Activities: Dissemination, Knowledge-Sharing, and Skills-Enhancement

1. Assessment Guide in Spanish available in print and e-format.

2. Three webinars were delivered between Jan-March 2015 (with the support of the Leadership, Learning and Innovation (LLI) group of the World Bank) and can be downloaded at the following links:
- An Introduction to the What, Why and How of Forest Governance Assessment
- Doing a Forest Governance Assessment—Practical Tips and Tricks
- Using a Forest Governance Assessment—From Diagnosis to Action

3. Three podcasts were produced (based on the above 3 webinars):

An introduction to the What, Why and How of forest governance assessment

Using a forest governance assessment—From diagnosis to action

Doing a forest governance assessment—Practical tips and tricks

4. A facilitated e-learning course on forest governance developed with LLI support. This is a five module course with 4 completed deliveries and a fifth on-going.

5. Presentation of the Assessment Guide at Interlaken+10—Governing Forest Landscapes, Feb. 6, 2015, Interlaken, Switzerland.

6. A discussion session on forest governance and ways forward at the World Forestry Congress at Durban, in September 2015.

7. FCPF presentation at Steering Committee meeting on Forest Governance, in April, 2016.

8. Assessment Guide in French available in print and e-format.

9. Organized a role playing exercise- Scoring Forest Governance Indicators- for FIP country teams to learn about PROFOR’s forest governance monitoring and assessment tool, at the FIP Pilot Countries Meeting, Oaxaca, Mexico, June 12-14, 2016.

10. Mainstreamed the governance diagnostic tool as a resource in the Forest Landscapes 101 e-learning course.

Pillar II Activities: Initiating and Improving Action in Countries

1. In Congo DRC, the PROFOR supported diagnostic exercise reached out to a non-traditional stakeholder group—the artisanal loggers in the informal sector. Their opinions were systematically gathered through an interactive process, in four sub-regional workshops. Each workshop included 10-25% women as participants.  The challenges which they face and potential actions to address those, was presented in a report to the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. The DRC assessment on forest governance has also informed a World Bank piece of Economic and Sector Work that is taking stock of the DRC’s forest sector and its governance, and which will guide the Bank’s future interventions in the sector.

2. In Mozambique, implemented a forest governance diagnostics exercise. The activity customized a forest governance indicator set. It then used this indicator set in two field workshops to systematically gather information from multiple forest sector stakeholders. The findings and emerging implications were channeled into the Forest Investment Program (FIP) project for the country and have significantly shaped the actions geared to improving governance for Mozambique. Equally important, the diagnostic exercise has identified a handful of priority indicators that the government and the FIP project can use for periodic assessments of the status of forest governance.

3. In Congo RDC, supported a preliminary governance assessment. With the support of the government, a preliminary, forest governance assessment was implemented, using PROFOR’s forest governance diagnostic framework. A long background paper was prepared, based on the assessment. In addition, a short note was prepared for inclusion in the country’s ASA’s Umbrella Policy Note.  The work provides a first overview of governance in the sector, a subject into which the Bank has so far paid only limited attention, and forms the basis for future detailed work.

4. In Afghanistan, PROFOR helped the South Asia Environmental Practice Group adapt the PROFOR forest governance diagnostic into an institutional and technical capacity diagnostic. Afghanistan applied the tool in Kabul in May 2017 as part of an ESW, “Capacity Development for Natural Resource Management". The Government enthusiastically embraced the exercise and now wants to conduct assessments at the provincial level throughout the country. This use has demonstrated the versatility of the  FAO–PROFOR governance framework to address resource management issues, beyond just forestry. 

Other Activities

1. Undertook a partner-led evaluation (under the KNOWFOR initiative of DFID) of the impacts of the DRC and Mozambique forest governance diagnostic exercises, and the e-learning course.

2. Developed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Governance GP that has resulted in a new programmatic activity on governance.

CHALLENGE

Key features of good governance include adherence to the rule of law, transparency, inputs of all stakeholders in decision-making, accountability of all officials, low regulatory burden, and political stability. While it is widely agreed that good governance in the forest sector is an essential requirement for sustainable forest management, there is much less agreement on what comprises good forest governance and how to distinguish good from poor forest governance. Nevertheless, recent years have seen careful research and serious thinking on these issues, which has moved the international community of practice to a point of relatively robust agreement regarding the scope of what constitutes good forest governance and how to measure the quality of forest governance in a specific setting. However, the challenge that the international community faces is that the knowledge on the what of forest governance has not been widely and effectively disseminated, nor has the how of forest governance been piloted and implemented as extensively as the expected benefits to such application would merit. Without such a consolidated information base, countries are hampered in their ability to undertake steps to apply good governance and assessments to achieving sustainable forest management (SFM). This activity seeks to address these shortcoming.

APPROACH

The activities included in this program are organized under two pillars:

(i) Dissemination, knowledge sharing and skills enhancement:

• Translation of the 2014 publication of Assessing Forest Governance: A Practical Guide to Data Collection, Analysis, and Use, also called the “Assessment Guide,” into Spanish and French. This Assessment Guide will provide the foundation in which to develop the other listed products.
• Webinars
• E-learning course
• Bite-sized learning products (blogs, podcasts)
• Outreach (e.g. international conferences)

(ii) Initiating and improving action in countries: The team will support advanced country-specific training and implementation of measurement approaches that empower countries to embed forest governance in operations, improving their effectiveness and creating additional investment opportunities in the sector. 

RESULTS

This activity has been completed. Results include the following:

Pillar I Activities: Dissemination, Knowledge-Sharing, and Skills-Enhancement

1. Assessment Guide in Spanish available in print and e-format.

2. Three webinars were delivered between Jan-March 2015 (with the support of the Leadership, Learning and Innovation (LLI) group of the World Bank) and can be downloaded at the following links:
- An Introduction to the What, Why and How of Forest Governance Assessment
- Doing a Forest Governance Assessment—Practical Tips and Tricks
- Using a Forest Governance Assessment—From Diagnosis to Action

3. Three podcasts were produced (based on the above 3 webinars):

An introduction to the What, Why and How of forest governance assessment

Using a forest governance assessment—From diagnosis to action

Doing a forest governance assessment—Practical tips and tricks

4. A facilitated e-learning course on forest governance developed with LLI support. This is a five module course with 4 completed deliveries and a fifth on-going.

5. Presentation of the Assessment Guide at Interlaken+10—Governing Forest Landscapes, Feb. 6, 2015, Interlaken, Switzerland.

6. A discussion session on forest governance and ways forward at the World Forestry Congress at Durban, in September 2015.

7. FCPF presentation at Steering Committee meeting on Forest Governance, in April, 2016.

8. Assessment Guide in French available in print and e-format.

9. Organized a role playing exercise- Scoring Forest Governance Indicators- for FIP country teams to learn about PROFOR’s forest governance monitoring and assessment tool, at the FIP Pilot Countries Meeting, Oaxaca, Mexico, June 12-14, 2016.

10. Mainstreamed the governance diagnostic tool as a resource in the Forest Landscapes 101 e-learning course.

Pillar II Activities: Initiating and Improving Action in Countries

1. In Congo DRC, the PROFOR supported diagnostic exercise reached out to a non-traditional stakeholder group—the artisanal loggers in the informal sector. Their opinions were systematically gathered through an interactive process, in four sub-regional workshops. Each workshop included 10-25% women as participants.  The challenges which they face and potential actions to address those, was presented in a report to the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. The DRC assessment on forest governance has also informed a World Bank piece of Economic and Sector Work that is taking stock of the DRC’s forest sector and its governance, and which will guide the Bank’s future interventions in the sector.

2. In Mozambique, implemented a forest governance diagnostics exercise. The activity customized a forest governance indicator set. It then used this indicator set in two field workshops to systematically gather information from multiple forest sector stakeholders. The findings and emerging implications were channeled into the Forest Investment Program (FIP) project for the country and have significantly shaped the actions geared to improving governance for Mozambique. Equally important, the diagnostic exercise has identified a handful of priority indicators that the government and the FIP project can use for periodic assessments of the status of forest governance.

3. In Congo RDC, supported a preliminary governance assessment. With the support of the government, a preliminary, forest governance assessment was implemented, using PROFOR’s forest governance diagnostic framework. A long background paper was prepared, based on the assessment. In addition, a short note was prepared for inclusion in the country’s ASA’s Umbrella Policy Note.  The work provides a first overview of governance in the sector, a subject into which the Bank has so far paid only limited attention, and forms the basis for future detailed work.

4. In Afghanistan, PROFOR helped the South Asia Environmental Practice Group adapt the PROFOR forest governance diagnostic into an institutional and technical capacity diagnostic. Afghanistan applied the tool in Kabul in May 2017 as part of an ESW, “Capacity Development for Natural Resource Management". The Government enthusiastically embraced the exercise and now wants to conduct assessments at the provincial level throughout the country. This use has demonstrated the versatility of the  FAO–PROFOR governance framework to address resource management issues, beyond just forestry. 

Other Activities

1. Undertook a partner-led evaluation (under the KNOWFOR initiative of DFID) of the impacts of the DRC and Mozambique forest governance diagnostic exercises, and the e-learning course.

2. Developed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Governance GP that has resulted in a new programmatic activity on governance.

The process of political and economic reform in Europe's transition economies has created significant incentives for changing the way forest institutions conserve and manage Europe's forests. These incentives are strong both at the country level, because of the need for institutions which are responsive to local demands for forest services and products, but also within the global context, where various international commitments for forest and biodiversity conservation have created incentives to develop institutional systems which are more responsive to these demands as well.

Forest Institutions in Transition [PDF, 2005] is the result of a review of 17 forest organizations in both transition economies, as well as in several forest-rich OECD economies. Key challenges of forestry sector reform identified relate to how well and how quickly conservative forest organizations have been able to adapt to a combination of two simultaneous factors: increasingly fast and 'fashionable', domestically driven (frequently ad hoc), post-socialist economic and administrative reforms, and more profound and consumer-driven changes in the forest products industries. A major finding from this review is that to be successful in adapting to changing demands, forest institutional reform must focus on how forest organizations can operate as service delivery institutions.

This publication provides strategic guidance on institutional performance criteria for delivering multi-functional and environmentally sustainable forest management. It also addresses some of the special challenges for countries which are moving toward accession to the European Union as they seek to develop their forest management institutions in a manner which is consistent with other EU models and standards.

The process of political and economic reform in Europe's transition economies has created significant incentives for changing the way forest institutions conserve and manage Europe's forests. These incentives are strong both at the country level, because of the need for institutions which are responsive to local demands for forest services and products, but also within the global context, where various international commitments for forest and biodiversity conservation have created incentives to develop institutional systems which are more responsive to these demands as well.

Forest Institutions in Transition [PDF, 2005] is the result of a review of 17 forest organizations in both transition economies, as well as in several forest-rich OECD economies. Key challenges of forestry sector reform identified relate to how well and how quickly conservative forest organizations have been able to adapt to a combination of two simultaneous factors: increasingly fast and 'fashionable', domestically driven (frequently ad hoc), post-socialist economic and administrative reforms, and more profound and consumer-driven changes in the forest products industries. A major finding from this review is that to be successful in adapting to changing demands, forest institutional reform must focus on how forest organizations can operate as service delivery institutions.

This publication provides strategic guidance on institutional performance criteria for delivering multi-functional and environmentally sustainable forest management. It also addresses some of the special challenges for countries which are moving toward accession to the European Union as they seek to develop their forest management institutions in a manner which is consistent with other EU models and standards.

The process of political and economic reform in Europe's transition economies has created significant incentives for changing the way forest institutions conserve and manage Europe's forests. These incentives are strong both at the country level, because of the need for institutions which are responsive to local demands for forest services and products, but also within the global context, where various international commitments for forest and biodiversity conservation have created incentives to develop institutional systems which are more responsive to these demands as well.

Forest Institutions in Transition [PDF, 2005] is the result of a review of 17 forest organizations in both transition economies, as well as in several forest-rich OECD economies. Key challenges of forestry sector reform identified relate to how well and how quickly conservative forest organizations have been able to adapt to a combination of two simultaneous factors: increasingly fast and 'fashionable', domestically driven (frequently ad hoc), post-socialist economic and administrative reforms, and more profound and consumer-driven changes in the forest products industries. A major finding from this review is that to be successful in adapting to changing demands, forest institutional reform must focus on how forest organizations can operate as service delivery institutions.

This publication provides strategic guidance on institutional performance criteria for delivering multi-functional and environmentally sustainable forest management. It also addresses some of the special challenges for countries which are moving toward accession to the European Union as they seek to develop their forest management institutions in a manner which is consistent with other EU models and standards.

The process of political and economic reform in Europe's transition economies has created significant incentives for changing the way forest institutions conserve and manage Europe's forests. These incentives are strong both at the country level, because of the need for institutions which are responsive to local demands for forest services and products, but also within the global context, where various international commitments for forest and biodiversity conservation have created incentives to develop institutional systems which are more responsive to these demands as well.

Forest Institutions in Transition [PDF, 2005] is the result of a review of 17 forest organizations in both transition economies, as well as in several forest-rich OECD economies. Key challenges of forestry sector reform identified relate to how well and how quickly conservative forest organizations have been able to adapt to a combination of two simultaneous factors: increasingly fast and 'fashionable', domestically driven (frequently ad hoc), post-socialist economic and administrative reforms, and more profound and consumer-driven changes in the forest products industries. A major finding from this review is that to be successful in adapting to changing demands, forest institutional reform must focus on how forest organizations can operate as service delivery institutions.

This publication provides strategic guidance on institutional performance criteria for delivering multi-functional and environmentally sustainable forest management. It also addresses some of the special challenges for countries which are moving toward accession to the European Union as they seek to develop their forest management institutions in a manner which is consistent with other EU models and standards.