SUMMARY

The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) is an important international forest governance initiative, yet various implementation challenges remain. The FLEGT VPA implementation challenges are well-documented in the scientific literature, where various methodologies and research approaches have been used. As the empirical case indicated various contradicting and overlapping claims, where different respondents framed the same situations as strengths as well as weaknesses, and/or as threats as well as opportunities, we used the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) approach to assess the associated governance changes in FLEGT VPA implementation in Ghana. This paper offers new insights derived from participant observation of the second independent technical evaluation of the Ghana Timber Legality Assurance System (GhTLAS) conducted in July 2019, and from semi-structured interviews with key informants and a document review. What are considered the greatest perceived strengths – namely multi-stakeholder engagement, clarification of regulatory frameworks, and access to information – are brought into question once the identified weaknesses and threats are explored in more detail. The identified weaknesses include the top-down nature of the multi-stakeholder process, fatigue related to additional legality principles, and bureaucracy of the GhTLAS, which negatively affect VPA implementation activities and processes in Ghana.

SUMMARY

To ensure the protection of natural and planted forests in South-East Asia, it is vital that the risks posed by invasive and local pests are minimised and that effective mitigation and response plans are in place. To do so, forest biosecurity laws need to be developed to coordinate policy, direct on-ground activities to prepare the region to respond to an incursion and empower relevant agencies to act. In this review, we outline the current laws and legislations relevant to the forestry sector in six ASEAN countries and make suggestions on forest biosecurity laws that could be developed. We put forward general recommendations on how these laws may be developed, with a focus on a regional approach to forest biosecurity. This could be implemented through the formation of a forest biosecurity working group as a sub-committee to the ASEAN Forest Products Industry Club, to promote global safety in invasive pests of native and planted forests of member countries.

SUMMARY

This study analyses the contribution of agroforestry to the achievement of SDGs based on the performance of agroforestry and North Korea's Voluntary National Review (VNR). Since the early 2000s, North Korea has promoted agroforestry and worked with the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), and the FAO to expand agroforestry projects. Agroforestry has contributed to the achievement of food security and land restoration in SDG2 and SDG15. The achievement of SDGs from individual agroforestry pilot projects since the early 2000s allows the assessment of agroforestry's contribution to SDGs. North Korea is likely to restore degraded forests by sustainable forest management (SDG15), which emphasises the need for new land cultivation in the VNR to strengthen food security (SDG2). Because agroforestry practices can simultaneously enhance food, nutrition, environmental, and energy security, agroforestry can further contribute to the achievement of other SDGs by discovering models that reflect local characteristics and inducing residents to participate through a strict evaluation of their effectiveness and the use of ‘sloping land’ management accompanied by the development of cultivation technologies suitable for mixed management with various trees and crops.

SUMMARY

Under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 requires setting aside vast currently managed areas for conservation purposes. Following bureaucratic politics theory, forestry and environmental domestic bureaucracies use these international targets in their struggle for power and territoriality over forested areas. Against this background, this study aims to analyze the resulting politics on setting aside forest areas from active forest management in Germany and Sweden. Employing a qualitative case study design and empirical data from policy documents and key informant interviews, our results indicate that bureaucracies prioritize instruments that are well aligned with their formal objectives, the interests of their informal constituencies, and their territorial interests. Such struggles dominate the development of policy instruments in both countries obstructing political compromise which results in a logjam in the development of substantial forest set-aside policy. We conclude that unless domestic politics and key bureaucracies provide conducive political conditions international commitments will be very difficult to achieve, even if they are formulated into clearly measurable international targets.

SUMMARY

In recent years, non-industrial private forestry (NIPF) for timber production has gained economic importance in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Access to benefits accrued from NIPF represents an opportunity for poverty alleviation. Access and distribution of the benefits are affected by governance, which is an important aspect in this regard. This paper focuses on state regulations, which in the context of Africa and Tanzania in particular, have received scant attention in the value chain studies. The paper seeks to respond to three main questions: i) How is the timber value chain regulated? (ii) What strategies do the value chain actors use to gain access to benefits? And iii) how do regulations affect the incomes of the chain actors? Data for the study were collected from Njombe District through documentary analysis, focus group discussions, observations and in-depth interviews with key informants. The study findings show that while the government is the sole regulator of the chain, regulations are implemented differently at the sub-national level. Industrial and non-industrial private forestry are placed under the same regulatory framework despite their many differences. This has partly resulted in high transaction costs, which are unaffordable by the majority of actors in the NIPF value chain. Despite strict regulations and many taxes paid, the actors adopt different strategies such as using locally available materials and capitalizing on social networks in maximizing their incomes from the timber business. The regulations affect incomes of all actors, however, tree growers are the most-affected category. This is because tree growers possess limited capital to engage in high value chain activities and strict regulations aggravate the situation. The paper concludes that the contribution of non-industrial private forestry to poverty alleviation is stifled by cumbersome district and state regulations that limit actors' access to profitable markets.

SUMMARY

Current Ethiopian policies and laws recognize the importance of equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms for natural resource management. The question of ‘what is fair’ is often unclear in practice. We pursue this question in the context of benefit sharing for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) in Ethiopia. We present findings from interviews conducted in 2017 with 33 national REDD+ actors, and a review of national policies and laws until 2020 to understand Ethiopia’s policy and legal framework, and vision for a REDD+ benefit-sharing mechanism. Our findings show that Ethiopia is progressing in developing a benefit-sharing mechanism (BSM) for REDD+. Government policies on benefit sharing are pro-poor with an emphasis on legal rights. Among the various concepts of fairness, more stakeholders agreed that benefits should be shared according to efforts made to reduce deforestation and forest degradation rather than being based on poverty or legal rights. Left unattended, we believe this divergence of opinion on ‘what is fair’ opens the potential for questions regarding the legitimacy of the REDD+ BSM among stakeholders in general and can pose practical implementation challenges. We suggest that establishing open dialogue, learning mechanisms and inclusive processes can lead to regulations, policies and procedures that clarify and harmonize the different views on fairness over time.

SUMMARY

The 2012 European Bioeconomy Strategy has been adopted in some European countries' national policies. However, it has not been officially included in the Czech Republic's national policy. In Sweden, the Bioeconomy Strategy has been adopted in the national policy and the National Forest Programme (NFP). The paper reviews the current forest policy in the Czech Republic in meeting the purposes of the forest-based bioeconomy by performing a comparative study between the Czech Republic and Sweden. As bioeconomy principles are core values in the Swedish NFP it aims not only to deliver sustainable forest products and ecosystem services to support forest enterprises but also to achieve a fossil-fuel-free Sweden. Although the Czech Forest Policy denotes the European Bioeconomy Strategy as one of the reference documents, it does not directly relate to shifting from fossil fuels to bioenergy. The implementation of the Czech document is limited to the forest-based sector. Bioeconomy principles are expected to be included in inter-ministerial committees at the government level in the Czech Republic. The challenges faced by the country include fulfilling the provision of sustainable forest biomass and high added-value products while harmonising forest policies and regulations.

SUMMARY

Burkinabé women have traded shea kernels and shea butter in periodic local markets, and on a regional scale with the densely-populated West African littoral, for centuries. This paper traces the origins of French colonial efforts to develop shea as a commodity of empire from the 1890s to independence in 1960.

Colonial efforts to incorporate Upper Volta, a French colonial backwater, into the world economy was drawn out, heterogenous, and messy. The colonial state assumed erroneously that little shea trade existed, and that producers would respond positively to market incentives. Yet, we suggest that French colonial policies failed due to a composite of factors including the limited investment in either the colony or shea as an oilseed crop, adaptation by women shea producers to the extraction of male labour and the trade opportunities created by new international borders, and the ‘blindness’ of colonial officials to the economic, social and cultural functions of periodic local markets used by women shea traders. The historical trajectory of the shea trade continues to have implications for current-day shea markets and their actors.

SUMMARY

After Burkina Faso's independence, shea butter continues to be the key staple edible oil used by Burkinabe households although alternatives are now being placed in local markets. Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa C.F. Gaertn.) is primarily managed as a food tree crop for African consumers but has been promoted as a wild and abundant crop which gives African women cash and empowerment. New international demand for edible Cocoa Butter Equivalents (CBEs) from the 1960s onwards led to the introduction of several state-led efforts to regulate and control the shea trade through stabilization funds and parastatal marketing boards. These were abandoned after 1984, when cocoa prices collapsed and shea markets were liberalized. Increasingly since 2003, several leading Trans-National Corporations that manufacture CBEs are involved in sourcing shea kernels to meet the growing demands of the multi-billion-dollar confectionary and cosmetics industries. Burkina Faso and Ghana are two of the main exporting countries producing 60–75% of all international shea offtake. West, Central and East African women shea collectors and their associations have also managed, more recently, to meet the growing demand for ‘hand-crafted’ shea butter for the global personal care sector and new niches in the edible oil industry. Attempts to explain the radical transformation of shea supply chains in West Africa have focused on relatively recent events and actions detached from the broader historical context in which they are embedded. This paper adopts a broad periodization, stemming from the formulation of CBEs incorporating shea and palm stearin in the 1960s, and using a Global Production Network approach to understand the role and position of women shea producers and their associations at the intersection of global, regional, and local periodic markets. It challenges the assumption that global markets are necessarily a more viable alternative to reliance on local, domestic, or regional markets. The growth of global trade in shea kernels and shea butter has been accompanied by significant land cover and land use changes which has led to the progressive loss of trees, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services such as pollination and carbon sequestration. This presents new socio-economic challenges, including threats to local food and nutrition security, tenure rights and the livelihoods of local communities.