A9o: Forestry in transition? Forest policies in changing societies. Part 2: Global examples

Researchers often emphasize the significance of devolving sufficient forest rights to farmers; however, the question remains whether farmers living in a rapidly changing society can successfully manage forests even if they obtain sufficient rights. This case study focuses on a community that conducted two forest devolution reforms in different periods. These two forest devolution reforms, despite their similar contents and goals, caused totally different outcomes. Based on the process tracing method, we explore why these two devolution reforms have different efficacy by unraveling the interactions between forest devolution and the dramatic socio-economic changes of the community. We find that although the second forest devolution reform tried to duplicate the success of the first one, it neglected the socio-economic changes including income increase, outmigration, livelihood diversification, market changes and the decreasing importance of forests, thereby failing to stimulate farmers’ enthusiasm about managing forests and exposing farmers to high market risks instead. Therefore, although farmers obtained substantial forest rights in the second reform, they failed to successfully self-organize to manage forests. We argue that before implementing forest devolution we need to determine whether the local socio-economic context facilitates the self-organization of managing forests and a dynamic perspective is needed to make policies compatible with rapid socio-economic changes.

Some 160 million hectares of degraded lands need to be restored in the Sahel region, but only few attempts have been made to assess the costs and benefits of these restoration efforts. FAO has teamed up with other institutions to fill this gap by establishing a methodological framework for cost-benefit analysis and by conducting a pilot study of restoration projects in the region. Preliminary results show that the cost of restoration activities starts at about USD 300 per hectare and rises along with more sophisticated interventions and on more difficult sites. Furthermore, the tangible benefits for local residents are rather limited, but adding the benefits of other ecosystem services would make these projects have a much higher benefit-cost ratio. The results of this study would be available in the summer of 2019 and be ready to be presented at IUFRO 2019.  

In Japan, woodland owners or their agents can formulate a five-year plan named "Collective Forest Management Plan" (CFMP) and submit it to the local government, which allows them to obtain subsidies for silvicultural operations. However, each CFMP must fulfill some numerical constraints, one of which is the allowable cutting volume restriction defined by a formula similar to the Austrian formula. Although this public rule can theoretically constrain the unregulated intensive clearcutting, it seems to disturb CFMP submission in actuality and lead to the low rate of CFMP-covering area. 

This allowable cutting volume is calculated from the stand age and site index of each stand recorded in the public forest registries which cover the whole Japanese private forests. However, recent forest data from such as LiDAR and NFI have revealed the inaccuracy of the existing stand volume estimation model. 

For the sustainability of forestry and forest resource, effective yield regulation for Japanese public system is examined, considering the shift of the allowable cutting volume of Japanese CFMP system followed by additional precise forest information.

Forests in Kenya are sources of timber, firewood, grazing; and are niches for conserving biodiversity. The last three decades have witnessed a transition of forest governance from community to joint management under different governance regimes. A review of forest management documents, Discussion with Focus Groups and Key Informant revealed that: this transformation has not changed the way communities perceive forests “as a resource to support their survival”. It showed that: high poverty levels are prevalent in forest adjacent communities’ forests contribute to rural and urban household energy and livelihoods needs with urban forests providing both aesthetic and basic needs to the communities differentially across the well-being status. The well-off communities perceive forests as beautiful and should be preserved for aesthetic value. The provision of alternative products and services have not replaced the needs or changed less-off members value system.  This poses a dilemma to the stakeholders as increasingly the country is getting urbanized and the poor are not reducing proportionately. Experts opine that by 2030 over 90% of the forests in the country will be under joint management. The country will witness forests neighbouring large urban centre being managed through co-existence with stakeholders contributing on their own volition to ensure provision of environmental services. We are moving to a time when urbanized communities will be using the slogan, “the forests are very beautiful, let us go to the forest to enjoy and relax”. This move calls for a schematic engagement with stakeholders and policy makers’ to support the transformation.

Attempts to encourage smallholder tree growing with policies and incentives have had variable outcomes and earlier research and theories have identified various important factors in the enabling environment and in promotional policies. Success of policies and incentives depends on the socioeconomic context where they are applied, the overall political and market environment, the perseverance of policies, and relevancy of incentives to target the actual hindrances for tree growing. A systematic analysis was carried out to complement previous qualitative research, and to clarify which factor combinations produce increased smallholder tree growing in developing country contexts. We applied two-step Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to identify necessary and sufficient factors in the enabling environment over time between 1990-2015 in Indonesian Java, Kalimantan & Sumatra, Lao PDR, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam. Material was collected through field research (smallholder and key informant interviews) in Tanzania and Lao PDR, and literature review. Strong tenure rights and demand were always necessary and sometimes even sufficient alone to trigger commercial tree growing. Well-functioning wood markets or strong knowledge base combined with direct incentives played their role as sufficient conditions in many cases and increased the pace of tree growing area expansion. Indirect incentives we insignificant in our case countries as an enabling factor. A key message to policy-makers is that governments are in a central role firstly, in ensuring tenure rights, and secondly as knowledge-service and incentive providers as they may be needed to set up sufficient enabling environment for smallholder tree growing to take-off.

Background: Zambia has a large population of its people living in rural areas and depending on forests for livelihoods. Despite high deforestation of about 250 000 to 300 000 ha/year, Zambia has about 66% of its land covered by the forests of which 45% is Miombo woodlands. Forest management in Zambia aims to strengthen participation in the utilisation of forest resources. Most forest programs, however, are often designed without taking into account the features of households that could influence participation. Ultimately this has resulted in a lack of understanding of the socioeconomic behaviours that determine households’ willingness to participate in forest programs.

Methods: We present preliminary findings from a cross-sectional study using data from 412 households interviewed in the Miombo areas. We introduced an instrumental variable approach to address endogeneity between latent participation and willingness to participate, and parameters estimated using two-stage least square. Predictors of willingness to participate were identified using a binary logistic regression with backward stepwise regression. 

Results: The factors that were significantly associated with willingness to participate in forest programs were: head of household educational level (OR=3.31) and access to credit (OR=2.17). The following negatively affected households’ willingness to participate: access to roads (OR=0.64), loss of forest cover (OR=0.19), increasing age (OR=0.98), ethnic grouping (OR=0.61), and self-employment (OR=1.00).

Discussion: Findings are in agreement with most studies; higher educational levels, and access to credit, significantly influences willingness to participate in forest programs. Interventions such as REDD+ should target increasing community-wide access to education and credit facilities.