Among other objectives, certification aims to improve environmental outcomes in developing country forests. Yet little is known about whether and how it actually generates such benefits. To shed light on these questions, an analysis was conducted of 1 162 corrective action requests (CARs) issued after third-party inspections of 35 forests in Mexico certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. CARs detail the changes in procedures and on-the-ground conditions that forest managers must make to obtain or retain certification. Based mainly on simple summary statistics, the findings are mixed. On one hand, most forest managers quickly complied with CARs and received fewer over time— results suggesting that certification generated environmental benefits. But most CARs addressed minor procedural issues and focused on social, economic and legal issues rather than on-the-ground environmental changes—results indicating the opposite. Follow-on research comparing the environmental performance of certified and similar uncertified forests would help resolve this uncertainty.

Increased attention to the role of forests in mitigating climate change through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD ) underscores the importance of taking local forest access and user rights into account to protect forest-based livelihoods. This paper uses baseline data from a USAID-funded impact evaluation of a REDD program in Zambia to examine the multiple interests and institutional actors that converge on forests and explore how they intersect to shape forest access and tenure security. We analyze how forest users in this site on the cusp of REDD program implementation view local governance and navigate the institutions that shape current forest access and management, finding low rates of forest user participation in local forest governance and a weak accountability system. REDD safeguards potentially present both an opportunity and a mechanism to improve forest governance, but only if embedded into REDD processes and accompanied by structural change.

This paper reports and reflects on the pilot application of an 11-step policy learning protocol that was developed by Cashore and Lupberger (2015) based on several years of Cashore's multi-author collaborations. The protocol was applied for the first time in Peru in 2015 and 2016 by the IUFRO Working Party on Forest Policy Learning Architectures (hereinafter referred to as the project team). The protocol integrates insights from policy learning scholarship (Hall 1993, Sabatier 1999) with Bernstein and Cashore's (2000, 2012) four pathways of influence framework. The pilot implementation in Peru focused on how global timber legality verification interventions might be harnessed to promote local land rights. Legality verification focuses attention on the checking and auditing of forest management units in order to verify that timber is harvested and traded in compliance with the law. We specifically asked: How can community legal ownership of, and access to, forestland and forest resources be enhanced? The protocol was designed as a dynamic tool, the implementation of which fosters iterative rather than linear processes. It directly integrated two objectives: 1) identifying the causal processes through which global governance initiatives might be harnessed to produce durable results ‘on the ground’; 2) generating insights and strategies in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. This paper reviews and critically evaluates our work in designing and piloting the protocol. We assess what seemed to work well and suggest modifications, including an original diagnostic framework for nurturing durable change. We also assess the implications of the pilot application of the protocol for policy implementation that works to enhance the influence of existing international policy instruments, rather than contributing to fragmentation and incoherence by creating new ones.

In recent years, legislation has been passed in many countries to reduce the trafficking of material from illegal logging sources. This legislation requiring companies to perform due diligence on products in their supply chain has led to a resurgence in interest of being able to reliably track logs from the forest to a processing facility to ensure that material is not from illegal sources in the country of origin. While emerging technologies including DNA and stable isotope analysis show promise for this purpose these technologies are often cost prohibitive and are not yet ready for large scale implementation. This manuscript focuses on the development of a new log tracking system that utilizes low technology and off-the shelf materials to allow companies to accurately track logs at a reasonable cost. The new system utilizes standard tree marking paint, with a microtaggant additive, applied to the cross sectional surface of a log in a large-format QR code format. This work details how this new system provides users with three levels of security making it difficult to be falsified, but can be quickly recognized by inspectors along the forest supply chain. We believe this low technology solution meets the due diligence requirements of legislation designed to control illegal logging and associated trade.

In South Africa, there is extensive NTFP trade within communities and via external markets. However, there is a limited indication of the proportion of all households trading one or more NTFPs, and how it varies in relation to local context. Therefore, this study sought to establish the proportion of households trading in NTFPs in sites of different distances to urban markets and agro-ecological zones of South Africa. The results showed that about 6.4% households reported selling NTFPs for various reasons, with many (22%) citing the need to earn cash income and limited employment opportunities (16.9%). Even though the returns from trading NTFPs are relatively low, every earning is very important to many cash-strapped rural households. This was demonstrated by the fact that many sellers of NTFPs used their earnings to augment household income and cover their living expenses.

Different countries embarked on the journey of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), with great expectations. Some countries have enjoyed the benefit of implementing several pilots, and thus, an assessment of projects' processes and outcomes is critical for learning how REDD can be achieved. Unfortunately, for Uganda the process has proved to be much slower, with only a few cases to learn from. The implementation process, achievements and challenges for a carbon offset project in Ongo community forest are presented in order to share experiences. The key achievements include formalization of the governance institutions, securing land rights and forest restoration. The bureaucratic process of gazetting community forests and the ambiguity of the payment scheme were key challenges. The success of REDD in Uganda rests crucially on documenting and sharing of experiences across pilot projects and similar initiatives so that we learn more rapidly and effectively.

Landscape is a complex of interacting ecosystems and humans. Conflicting interests among various actors with different values and rationalities occurs. A board game, the Landscape Game, was developed based on game theory to help understand the dynamics of land competition, policy measures and sustainability of a landscape. This game introduces landscape conservation, development, environmental services risks and investment alternatives. The game challenges rational players to maximize their revenues, while at the same time sustaining the landscape. Through this game, various policy instruments, e.g. rules, taxes, land use incentives and disincentives were tested. The game play results show the easiness in harmonising sustainability and development when productivity is low. If productivity increases then landscape sustainability can either increase or reduce, affected by government policies and players' actions. Lessons learned from the game can trigger changes in players' mental model. The digital version of the game provides opportunities for its wider use.

This study explores how deforestation relates to biophysical and socio-economic variables in a quantitative, spatially explicit analysis. Both patterns of historical (approximately 4000 B.C. — 2000 A.D.) and recent (1990–2005) deforestation were explored and compared. The study uses location analysis, combining spatially explicit global databases of deforestation with variables hypothesized to relate to deforestation (e.g. rural livestock density, cost-distance). The results show that historical and recent deforestation show similar patterns when plotted against the selected variables suggesting the relations to be empirical. The strongest relations were between deforestation and rural population density, cost-distance and crop suitability respectively. These findings support the hypothesis that agricultural expansion was the largest direct cause of deforestation historically and it continues to be the largest direct cause today. While crop suitability showed a strong correlation with deforestation, pasture suitability showed no correlation. The study accordingly compares contemporary deforestation in the tropical domain against economic development (approximated by a combination of GDP value and growth rate) which resulted in a reproduction of the deforestation pattern predicted by the forest transition curve. In view of the apparent empirical relation, the variables which relate to deforestation in this study are expected to have predictive power to identify locations of likely future deforestation. To illustrate the application value of this analysis, the deforestation risk in African protected forest was assessed. This assessment revealed that protected areas are found on locations with below average pressure and the pressures vary greatly in the different regions. The findings underline the importance of considering national circumstances to understand the government's efforts to manage its forests sustainably and contribute to international mitigation by reducing forest-related emissions.

The recovery of selectively harvested tropical forests should benefit from a range of management practices referred to as “Reduced Impact Logging (RIL)”. Failure to apply these practices is likely to slow recovery as has been observed in various regions of the world including Ghana. Although the Revised Logging Manual for Ghana (LMG) includes some RIL measures, forest recovery is slower than predicted by yield models and is unsustainable in the currently applied forty-year logging cycle. This study adopted a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate the implementation of RIL in Bobiri Forest Reserve, Ghana. A comparative analysis of the LMG and a Regional Code of Practice for reducedimpact forest harvesting was also conducted. The results of this study suggest that the implementation of RIL measures in Bobiri is sporadic due to barriers in the flow of information among stakeholders and to the lack of technical training for field staff of logging companies. Logging companies tend to implement RIL measures if they receive clear and feasible indications, but such information is often unavailable to them.