Forests for People

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Forest governance at global,

regional and local levels

Jeremy Rayner and Alexander Buck, International Union of Forest Research Organizations

n the most general sense of the term, ‘governance’ refers to any

effort at directing human activity towards the solution of prob-

lems requiring social coordination. The concept of governance

is always associated with the governance of problems;

thus, how

problems come to be defined as passing beyond the competence

of individuals, households and small communities is central to

understanding the emergence of governance challenges and the

‘governance modes’ that are ultimately chosen to meet them.

Specifically, the recent focus on governance, broadly understood,

is directly related to a widespread feeling that the mode of coordi-

nation associated with modern states – hierarchical governance

based on law and top-down administration – is struggling in the

face of two major challenges: globalization and devolution.

In response to these challenges, less emphasis is now placed on hierar-

chical coordination and more on steering through a mix of hierarchy,

markets and informal networks. These mixed modes of governance

have tended to blur traditional boundaries between the once well-

defined roles of state and non-state actors in problem solving, creating

some now familiar ‘new’ governance practices such as public private

partnerships, decentralized administration and a variety of multi-

jurisdictional networks that link international, regional,

national and local participants in a common endeavour.

However, even as they advance solutions to the prob-

lems that they were originally intended to address, it has

become very clear that such mixed or hybrid governance

modes tend to create formidable coordination problems

of their own, requiring metagovernance activities that

attempt to coordinate the coordinators.

The governance of forests exhibits all of these charac-

teristics. The nature of the problem that forest governance

is addressing is elusive, exhibiting strong spatial patterns.

Indigenous and community rights, local livelihoods,

regional economic development, control over national

resources and the preservation of a key component of

the global environmental commons are all invoked when

‘forest problems’ are debated. Globalization has had a very

dramatic impact on the trade in forest products and on

local ecologies, both natural and social. Increasing demand

for wood products in developed countries has been met

by imports from newly industrializing countries, notably

China, which, in turn, import timber from a variety of

developing countries, many of which have limited admin-

istrative capacity to regulate forestry activity.

Efforts to

build such capacity have often bypassed central govern-

ments, embracing (sometimes simultaneously) a variety

of practices such as forest certification, partnerships with

international non-governmental organizations (NGOs),

decentralized forest administration, community forests,

privatization and more. While the devolution theme has

been especially prominent,

many of these initiatives, such

as those directed at using forest certification to improve

forest management practices and protect indigenous rights

or trade agreements to combat illegal logging, are clearly

multijurisdictional, seeking to work with the dynamics

of globalized markets rather than trying to insulate local

communities from them.

The result is a complex patchwork of traditional

multilateral international agreements between states,

both legally and non-legally binding; global govern-

ance arrangements, such as forest certification and the

various capacity-building and ‘good governance’ initia-

tives promoted by international organizations like the

World Bank and OECD; some very strong regional agree-

ments between states; and a host of national, subnational

and local projects, each with its own distinct problem

framing and criteria of success and failure.

Globalization has a profound impact on forest management practices and trade in

forest products

Image: IUFRO