7
Forestry and land use
Duncan Poore and Stephen Bass
BEGINNING WORK ON SUSTAINABLE FOREST
MANAGEMENT BY DUNCAN POORE
To me, IIED was (and is) a wonderful and exceptional organization: driven by idealism but severely practical in application; lean and unimpeded by bureaucracy; efficient and with a dedicated staff. If it had faults, they were to do with excess of its good points. It was lean because it was always short of core funding; more would have helped to give thinking time and the exploration of new avenues for work. Sometimes, firmer management would have been an advantage; I had an annual contract for a number of years – never renewed, but that never seemed to matter.
To explain why I found it wonderful I shall have to do delve back into my past. At the end of World War II I became a biologist, changing from classics. There were two reasons for this. I was passionately fond of wild country and I was inspired by reading two books about the devastation caused by soil erosion, both published in the 1930s and 1940s – Rape of the Earth by Jacks and Whyte, and Road to Survival by William Vogt. I was also influenced by the writings of Frank Fraser Darling and by Frank himself, when I had the good fortune to work with him.
I soon found that there was a conflict between the two interests of the pure pursuit of nature conservation and the pure pursuit of productive land use. Working for the then Nature Conservancy in the mid-1950s, it seemed that too little consideration was given to economic land use. Working for the land-use survey company, Hunting Technical Services, on survey for pasture improvement in Jordan and Cyprus, it appeared that the complete acceptance of recommendations for improvement would lead to the disappearance of many beautiful types of grassland, rich in plants and insects.
It became evident that biological richness and biological productivity were inversely related to one another. At that time, all systems of land classification were based on the hierarchy: irrigated agriculture had preference over dryland agriculture; pasture came next in the pecking order; then commercial forestry; and, finally, the residue was left for the conservation of biological diversity. This hierarchy was axiomatic. For me, the resolution of this conflict became an important objective: how to devise a land-use policy to make room for both production and diversity?
Change came slowly in the 1960s and 1970s. Milestones were the system of land-use planning adopted in Canada and in the book, Ecological Principles for Economic Development.1 There was a ferment of new thinking in the preparations for the Stockholm Conference, which in its turn led to the foundation of IIED by Barbara Ward, and big changes in the programme of IUCN.
At that time I was working at IUCN and was able to set out the principle of planning for each use according to its individual merits in the IUCN Ecological Guidelines for Development in Tropical Rain Forests2 and in guidelines for mountains and for arid lands. The World Conservation Strategy3appeared shortly afterwards, then Brundtland4 – and this particular conceptual battle was won. But, granted the concept, its application depended upon social and economic considerations, in which IUCN was weak. Collaboration with IIED seemed the most fertile possibility. David Runnalls came to IUCN in the mid-1970s but no joint programme materialized – I do not know why.
My next contact with IIED came in 1982 when I was at Oxford. I had then become interested in the ways in which the future of a developing country's forests was affected by other aspects of that nation's policy, and by the trade and aid policies of those developed countries that dealt with them. As though in answer to a prayer, I was visited in Oxford by Brian Johnson with proposals for an IIED forestry programme in association with the Commonwealth Forestry Institute (now the Oxford Forestry Institute). At that very moment, Oxford University had decided to abolish the only undergraduate course in Britain which combined agriculture and forestry (a particularly important and topical combination). The result – I joined Brian in setting up what soon became the IIED Forestry and Land Use Programme. (Brian departed almost immediately afterwards and left me holding the baby – a baby of which I became inordinately fond. At the same time, I was joined by the economist David Burns and tall young Dutchman, Ronald van der Giessen.)
The programme that we developed together had two elements, one concerned with the tropical forestry policies and the other with the potential likely to be offered by the new International Tropical Timber Agreement. The first of these got off the ground in 1983, the second in 1985.
Developing policy on tropical forestry
Our forest policy programme was ambitious and not all of it came to fruition. We hoped to conduct simultaneous studies both in a few tropical countries and in some of their trade and aid partners. Among the developed countries, we discussed the proposal with the UK, The Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany and in all instances, though in different forms, reports were produced on the effects of trade and aid – what came later to be known as ‘ecological footprints’. Although these were not issued as part of a coordinated IIED programme, it would be nice to think that IIED had some influence in promoting the notion. The programme in tropical countries depended upon gaining financial support for each country study. There were finally three: Indonesia, supported by the Government of The Netherlands; Cameroon, by Canadian CIDA; and Zaire, supported by the World Bank. Indonesia was the most complete and successful.
The thinking behind our initiative was set out in a paper given to the 9th World Forest Congress in Mexico City by Mike Ross, who ran the Indonesian study, Setyono Sastrosumarto (Head of the Agency for Research and Development within the Ministry of Forestry in Jakarta) and myself5. Here are some extracts.
There is much stress in this Congress on the need to take a comprehensive, new look at the policies affecting the future of tropical forest lands ... It is clear that the future of these forests and of the soils they protect is greatly influenced by the policies and actions of other arms of Government than forestry – by overall economic policy, by population policy, by employment policy, by agriculture, public works, energy, trade, industry and transport.
If, therefore, these lands are to be developed effectively and used wisely, it is not enough to look at the policies of the forestry sector alone, but it is necessary to examine the ways in which these other policies affect the forest – in fact to conduct a wide-ranging policy review centred on the sustainable development of the tropical forests. The Government of Indonesia, in collaboration with the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) is carrying out such a review.
IIED's ... ultimate objective is ambitious – to influence the development and use of uncultivated lands in the tropics so that they may best contribute to the lasting benefit of the peoples there ... The way in which the Institute aims to go about it is to persuade Governments that it would be in their own interests to review their present policies; and, if they should then think it desirable, modify them or alter the priorities which they give to various aspects of them. In fact, to invest more in prevention rather than cure; the analogy of health and disease is very close.
There is no need to emphasize the need for change in many countries. The prevalence of erosion, floods, droughts and natural disasters speaks for itself. Yet, many Governments, for a complex of apparently very pressing social, economic and political reasons, continue to act in a way that pays scant regard to one of their greatest natural assets; and much bilateral and multilateral aid continues to abet them in short-sighted and destructive processes.
The review is primarily a domestic review. It is mainly carried out by Indonesia and Indonesians, and is intended to examine problems, explore possible solutions and to reach a consensus – an important part of Indonesia's policy formation – about possible alternative future policies. The role of IIED is to act as a stimulus, to provide assistance and to co-ordinate the review with those being carried out in other countries. It must be emphasized that this is not solely an evaluation carried out by a team of external consultants.
[Thus] the report... will not be the only result of the review, perhaps not even the most important. The Ministers concerned and IIED place the utmost importance on the effect of the review process. By exposing these issues to wide discussion and debate, both within and outside Government, it is hoped that a substantial change of views may be effected; and that the future of forest lands will become a central issue of Government policy, so that it may be used as one of the indicators by which satisfactory overall policies may be judged.
The IIED programme envisages stimulating comparable reviews in a number of tropical countries ... These would be carried out in a similar manner and, it is hoped, would lead to some generally applicable policy initiatives, particularly towards aid from donors and investment from overseas.
The review in Indonesia was conducted by Mike Ross, an eccentric and individualistic Australian born in New Britain, assisted by Deanna Donovan whom he later married. Mike had been working in Indonesia for several years on the controversial Transmigration programme by which large numbers of people from the over-crowded islands of Java, Bali and Madura were resettled in lowland areas of Kalimantan. He had become disenchanted with this programme but remained persona grata with the Indonesian authorities. He was ideally suited for our work. In the course of it he obtained personal interviews with almost all the Indonesian ministers and directors of departments of government. All of these were taped, except one; and the tapes – a remarkable record of views of the time – are stored in the IIED archives.
I was with him on the occasion of the single tape that failed. We had secured a much sought-after interview with General Moerdani, at that time Minister of Defence and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. We set up the tape with an introduction in the taxi as we approached the ministry. The interview was most cordial and very open. Moerdani agreed to be taped; in fact there was an exchange about the great benefits of tape recorders as Mike changed to the second channel. In the taxi afterwards we replayed – nothing! The tape had been wiped clean in the security check as we left. Distinctly humbled, we reconstructed as much as we could from memory. I can remember only two remarks Moerdani made. One was that, if we wished the forests to be kept secure from illegal encroachment or logging, it would be best if this were the responsibility of the army.The other was on the navigability of the Bornean rivers. He remarked that when he had been on active service in the mid-1960s in the ‘Konfrontasi’ with Malaysia, the lower reaches of the major Bornean rivers had been navigable for about nine months in the year; this was now reduced to three or four.
How effective was the Indonesian policy review? It is difficult to say. Although commissioned by the Minister for Forests, Soedjarwo, and received by him, the recommendations were never officially accepted; the report was too controversial for its time. The greatest effect, probably, was on the younger generation staff in the Ministry. Certainly, in the years that followed, the issues and conclusions of the report became more and more part of the accepted wisdom of the Ministry and gradually became incorporated in later reviews. Perhaps we were right in believing that in the long run the process was more important than the immediately resulting action.
Our ambitious programme never materialized. There were two more reviews, of Cameroon and Zaire – neither as thorough as that in Indonesia. The whole programme was unfortunately overtaken by the Tropical Forestry Action Plan, an amalgamation of work by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Bank on one hand, and of FAO on the other (developed over the previous two years and launched at the 9th World Forestry Congress), and which had support and funding from UNDP and the World Bank. We were smothered by the big boys. There is, though, an ironical twist to the story. The Tropical Forestry Action Plan ran into serious criticism, and eventually had to be recast, for failing to do exactly those things which the IIED programme had insisted were essential – to look at the effects of non-forestry policies on the forest, to consult widely and to influence policy from within rather than producing a portfolio of projects for external funding. But, our effectiveness was also drastically reduced at that time by the loss of the North American part of IIED which constricted possibilities for funding and narrowed our range of contacts, especially in Latin America.
The International Tropical Timber Agreement
The second main string to our bow was the International Tropical Timber Agreement, resulting from over seven years of negotiation under the Integrated Programme for Commodities of UNCTAD; the final text was agreed in November 1983. Its particular interest to IIED lay in the linkage it established between a flourishing timber trade and the sustainable management of the resource upon which that trade was based. It remains the only commodity agreement with an equal concern for the resource base, as illustrated especially by Article 1, paragraphs (b) and (h) of the Agreement:
Article 1 (b). To promote the expansion and diversification of international trade in tropical timber ... by taking into account, on the one hand, a long-term increase in consumption and continuity of supplies, and, on the other, prices which are remunerative to producers and equitable for consumers, and the improvement of market access.
Article 1 (h). To encourage the development of national policies aimed at sustainable utilization and conservation of tropical forests and their genetic resources, and at maintaining the ecological balance in the regions concerned.
Moreover, the International Tropical Timber Agreement was the only international Agreement to cover tropical forests; there might, there-fore, be some hope of affecting policies under this umbrella.
By late 1984, it appeared that the Agreement was likely to lapse because of lack of signatures and ratifications. The whole forestry team in IIED, Brian Johnson, David Burns, Ronald van der Giessen and I, considered that this would be a disaster and determined to call an international seminar in the middle of March 1985, in a last-minute attempt to bring in the laggards.
The seminar was held on 8–10 March 1985. The state of the ratification was then as follows: a deadline of 31 March had to be met for the Agreement to enter provisionally into force. On the ‘consumers’ side, there were enough signatures but one further ratification was required. On the ‘producers’ side, the situation was not nearly so favourable. Ten countries holding 500 votes were required. As only 7 countries with 356 votes had signed, 3 more signatures were required and, in addition, 8 further ratifications.
The seminar attendance figures were interesting: the highest proportion came from producer countries, and interest from consumer countries was variable. The UK was represented by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), the Forestry Commission and the Department of Trade and Industry; but the Timber Trade Federation was lukewarm about the Agreement and absent from the seminar. Canada was represented by CIDA. The USA did not come. Only France and The Netherlands sent representatives connected with the timber trade. Japan, which was making a strong and ultimately successful bid to provide the headquarters of the new organization, sent a large delegation. The members came under the firm impression that IIED was promoting London as the potential headquarters; only after we convinced them that this was not the case was their attitude transformed and they became very good friends to IIED within the Internatiolan Tropical Timber Organization ( ITTO). Of the environmental NGOs, IUCN and WWF were represented but both tended, at that stage, to be disinterested.
The debates during the seminar were interesting and constructive but most important were the conclusions and subsequent action. The final statement urges ‘everyone concerned to do all in their power to see that the Agreement enters into force, as soon as possible’. Telexes were then sent to the Foreign Ministries of all countries party to the Agreement. The result was dramatic. The necessary signatures were obtained and ratifications deposited before 31 March. This was a rare example of the right initiative at the right moment, and IIED could justly be styled the midwife of the International Tropical Timber Agreement.
From that time on, for a number of years, IIED was able to exercise an influence in the development of ITTO through being an observer at meetings of the Council. Our involvement led to our being commissioned by the Organization to work on a sequence of projects which have significantly promoted the sustainable management of tropical forests. The first and most influential of these was a request from the Executive Director that IIED should coordinate a study, in all the producer nations of ITTO, of the status of the sustainable management of their forests for timber production. This was a major effort in which I was involved with the assistance of Peter Burgess (Asia), Simon Rietbergen (Africa), Timothy Synnott (Latin America) and John Palmer (for a global commentary), aimed at finding out how much tropical forest was under sustainable management ‘at an operational scale’, identifying the factors which led to success or failure, and recommending what might be done about it.
The results, presented in 1988, shocked the International Timber Council and the timber trade in general; you could have heard a pin drop as I presented them to the Council. Less than 1 per cent of production forest was found to be managed to a satisfactory standard. Neither the tropical countries nor the timber trade queried the findings! We found that success was guaranteed only if four conditions were met: legal security of tenure for production forests; adequate control of operations within the forest; fair distribution of benefits and costs; and sufficient information to support sustainable management. In fact, the situation was not quite so bleak as this single figure might suggest; in several areas in several countries, one or more of the conditions for success were present; it only remained to attend to the missing elements.
The IIED report was written (and eventually published by Earthscan as No Timber Without Trees) in a form intended to induce the Council to develop an action plan. The Action Plan duly followed and was succeeded by a sequence of Guidelines, Criteria and Indicators and a further study of the status of forest management in 2000. Although IIED priorities have subsequently moved in other directions, I have built on the original IIED connection and have remained closely associated with the work of ITTO; and this has proved a fruitful and satisfying association. The work for ITTO of the Forestry and Land Use Programme was complemented by Ed Barbier and his colleagues who carried out a study for ITTO on ‘The Economic Linkages between the International Trade in Tropical Timber and the Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests’.
In 1985, I decided to give up any management role in the Forestry and Land Use Programme although I remained closely associated with its work. Julian Evans took over from me; and he was succeeded by Caroline Sargent and then by Steve Bass. The Programme has continued to go from strength to strength and produced some outstanding results in, for example, its integrated study of the paper cycle, its work on timber certification and, perhaps most significant of all, the series of studies on ‘Policy that works for forests and for people’.
The IIED experience, both the work itself and the people with whom I worked, have left a deep mark on all that I have done since. IIED has striven to integrate the ecological, the economic and the social, and to use this insight to promote environmentally sustainable development by realistic means. I believe now that the net has to be cast even more widely if Barbara Ward's vision is fully to be realized. The book I completed recently, Where Next? Reflections on the Human Future is, I hope, a small step in this direction. In it, in order to benefit from a wide range of perceptions about the present human predicament, I have assembled a collection of essays by people with wide experience in philosophy, science, economics, ecology, law, sociology, entrepreneurial skills and international relations. Taken together, these give the overwhelming impression that present attitudes and institutions are still ill adapted to the nature and scale of our problems. The future is in our hands; only we can put it right. I look upon this recent work as part of my inheritance from IIED.
POLICY THAT WORKS FOR FORESTS AND PEOPLE BY STEPHEN BASS
By the time Duncan had left the Forestry and Land Use Programme, foresters in dozens of countries were preoccupied with compiling encyclopaedic wish-lists. The ‘Tropical Forest Action Plans’ (TFAPs) of the late 1980s may have offered glimpses of a better world for forestry. They certainly conjured an illusion of progress for the bureaucrats in charge: lubricated by the aid system, promises of further funds were being stacked up fast to help developing countries realize the TFAPs’ dreams.
However, it soon became clear that real strategies for change were not going to be made by filling in proforma plans handed down from FAO or the World Bank – especially if the form-filling was done by external consultants. Such proformas included far more subject lines than any local stakeholder could possibly be interested in. Even so, stakeholders often could not find space for what they believed to be the real problems. As it turned out, little real change took place, and most of the promised funds did not materialize.
IIED's research was making it increasingly clear that TFAPs were as straws in the wind compared to the underlying causes of forest problems. Deforestation and disenfranchisement of forest-dependent groups are problems of perverse policy, unfettered markets and unequal stakeholder power. Forests are destroyed whenever people find it profitable and have the resources to do so. Any policies that make food production attractive, that lower transport and labour costs, and that reduce liabilities for the use of forest land will tend to help that profitability. Such policies tend to be pronounced or protected by people in power – both for corrupt reasons and through sheer inertia or fear of change. In contrast, those with the potential to change things for the better – the ‘forest stewards’ in waiting, with the knowledge or the livelihood-based incentives to sustain the forest – are being excluded from both rights to forests and access to policy processes.
From 1992, IIED shifted attention from servicing international model solutions, such as the TFAP, to working with local and national processes as the framework for tackling underlying causes of forest problems. Here, the challenge was to balance our servicing of national forest authorities’ immediate needs (we made the authorities the boss, not the TFAP) with exposing the authorities to other local stakeholders’ analyses of problems.
So began the approach we called, bluntly, ‘policy that works for forests and people’. Real progress requires changes in policy and power, otherwise all you have is the ‘planners’ dream’. Real progress links political will and good ideas from the top – the ‘policy-holders’ – with ‘what works’ from the bottom – the forest-dependent stakeholders.
Two IIED activities were precursors to ‘policy that works’. One was our exploration of national conservation strategies and environmental action plans – early versions of what Agenda 21 had called for in ‘national strategies for sustainable development’ (see Chapter 14).
The second precursor was a programme in Ghana to trace and improve the incentives for sustainable forestry. James Mayers, Nii-Ashie Kotey, Eddie Prah and Michael Richards pioneered ways to identify stakeholder motivations for sustaining or degrading forests, to ‘map’ the policies and market signals influencing these motivations, and to get the authorities talking with local groups. It was the Forestry and Land Use Programme's baptism in participatory appraisal; and also in the risks of confusing policy-makers’ openness with their readiness to change.
Many local Ghanaian stakeholders and forestry staff acclaimed our work – ‘you have sowed the seeds for change’. But a letter from higher authorities to ITTO, which had commissioned the project, claimed that ‘the IIED report is replete with scandalous falsehoods’. (An IIED staff member endured a long journey to Japan to report the findings, only to be ordered by the Ghanaian delegation to get right back on the return flight.) Since then, however, this work has inspired many improvements in Ghana: farmers have regained rights to trees on their land; a collaborative forest management unit has been set up; and decentralized forestry consultation and planning is routine.
We explored ‘Policy that works for forests and people’ in six countries – Ghana (we patched up old relations and went on to make real progress in use rights and certification), Zimbabwe, Pakistan, India, Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica.6
The art was to identify the ‘policy-holders’ (the authorities and heads of big companies and associations), the real representatives of forest-using groups (including the poor, although that was difficult), and the kinds of researchers who were both expert in forestry and institutional change, and credible to these other groups. We formed these people into national learning groups, which were spurred on by our local ‘engaged’ researchers.
These learning groups were charged with postulating some idea of success – what do we mean by ‘working for forests’ and ‘working for people’? Moreover, they had to go and look for those successes on the ground. Once found, these stories had to be told in full, and correlated with policy (not just formal policy, but the intentions and norms of all groups who had some kind of authority over forests). We were aware that, unless you understand the policy conditions for something that works on the ground, you can end up replicating it where it won't work – the old ‘cult of the success story’.
Finally, we needed to tease out what had produced those policies. What processes – of participation, information flow, innovation, investment, and capacity building – had led to decision-making for sustainable forestry? Where did they come from – traditional means of dealing with change, new projects, or special ‘process’ initiatives? These would be our elements of ‘policy that works’, which any national system would then need to bring together and build on – to keep sustainable forestry on the agenda and deal with change.
In practice, almost all was ‘policy that partially worked’. Even in Pakistan, a country with weak relations between civil society and government, and a forest department that was a museum piece serving anomalous anti-people purposes, there was evidence of hope. Major rural development projects, such as those run by the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, were turning first to villagers for information and skills, and were breaking down high institutional walls between government departments (even training officers and villagers together). They were forging new paths for making decisions that, later, began influencing thinking in the corridors of power.
In some countries, our work began to rehearse what was needed on a permanent basis – local and national multi-stakeholder fora, interdisciplinary research groups, or (for so many, and for the first time) a new ‘big picture’ and the emergence of a locally agreed vision for sustainable forestry. This is why many people did not call our work ‘research’. Key people in the aid system had the vision to push IIED into this role of ‘engaged research’ – Bill Howard and John Hudson of DFID really stand out. The result – as the Inspector General of Pakistan expressed, ‘is what the Forest Sector Master Plan [the TFAP] should have done’. Perhaps one of the most important outcomes has been the identification of the local groups that matter –the small farm forestry association in Costa Rica, for example. As Vicente Watson, our team leader in Costa Rica, put it, both he and the association ‘now really understand how decisions are made, and are routinely involved in policy change’. We were subsequently invited to extend the ‘policy that works’ approach to Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa and Himachal Pradesh. For the first three, this was to facilitate the design of a ‘national forest action plan’ that would avoid all the pitfalls of the TFAP approach.
International agreements, lingua franca and verification of forest sustainability
We developed a number of methods to find those local groups that matter most to forests and livelihoods. For example, Olivier Dubois tested the ‘4Rs’ diagnostic – rights, responsibilities, rewards and relationships – with charcoal burners in Zambia and farm foresters in Uganda.7 Now many African colleagues have used this framework for both participatory diagnosis and negotiating new roles. Generating your own information is much better when you want to strike a bargain than using other people's ‘facts’ and arguments.
Indeed, there is nothing more foolish to many forest stakeholders than the exhortation from northern NGOs to ‘save the rainforests’. ‘Save’? For whom? The real challenge is getting the forests that people want, and are prepared to pay for (including international payments where global services are being provided). Security of forest goods and services, and of the cultural and spiritual values associated with forests, is a more meaningful goal than arbitrary targets for halting deforestation or increasing the area of forests.
The search for ‘forest security’ seemed attractive, especially as the notion of food security had helped agriculture in earlier decades. It preoccupied me and, on the occasions we were invited to play, it anchored IIED's approach to the international forest games of the 1990s. (For example, Ola Ullsten, Chair of the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development, liked IIED's idea of ‘forest security’ and promoted the idea of a ‘forest security council’.)
In 1991, we were asked by GLOBE, an impetuous group of European MPs, US senators and members of the Japanese Diet, to work with Bart Romijn, James Cameron and Farhana Yamin in constructing a model ‘global forest convention’. At IIED, our hearts were not really in it, as we felt that the threat of supranational control of forests outweighed any likely willingness to pay countries for securing global forest services. Although we thought it was a useful straw man, it did not go away and we were asked to look at the case for a convention again – and again. Jag Maini, who ran the secretariat for the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF), got to know us during the work of the IPF. He is adept at explaining complex problems simply. He divided countries into four types – combinations of forest-rich/poor and income-rich/poor. His scheme helped us to explain why different countries seek different things from a global agreement – and why you can still witness amusing (or maddening) non-dialogues on forestry between trade officials from some countries and conservation officials from others.
IIED's Chairman, Sir Martin Holdgate, co-chaired the IPF, and IIED established its customary independent position on a convention. We put perhaps too much faith in delegates’ desire for a logical outcome, offering them a number of decision-making guides to help them work out whether a convention was really needed. (This faith was often misplaced. I was told by one delegate that ‘the need for a convention is irrelevant to whether there should be one’.) These guides were written for delegates to IPF, and subsequently to the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF, son of IPF), and may again be requested for the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF, grandson of IPF) which again will address the need for a convention. (The UNFF work programme includes a task on ‘Consideration with a View to Recommending the Parameters of a Mandate for Developing a Legal Framework on All Types of Forests’. The title suggests how it may be tackled.)
IIED has been asking: ‘what is it that can only be done by a global forest convention, and is there willingness and ability to pay?’ We have thrown attention on to the genuinely global services from forests (notably biodiversity and carbon storage), and on global causes of forest problems (debt and trade rules, for example). We have stressed the need to exercise existing instruments, as well as to get these instruments better informed about good forestry. For example, the Kyoto Protocol is particularly ill-informed, and could end up putting the cause of sustainable forestry back decades by creating incentives for huge blocks of heavily protected simple forest, owned by just a few groups and excluding others.
If a legally binding agreement on forests was not forthcoming in the 1990s, there was no shortage of guidance to help ‘bottom-up’ decision-making. The Earth Summit produced a set of forest principles. The IPF crafted these into an over-rich menu of 150 ‘proposals for action’, none of which were to be forced on any country, and the UNFF is adding more. Even the original set was so indigestible that I was volunteered to work with GTZ's energetic Chris Mersmann and the calm and ever-wise Markku Simula, chewing them for days until the early hours. The idea was to help countries work out which proposals would be most palatable to them. The answer is that few are particularly nourishing unless you have the local systems in place – the ‘Policy that works’ approach.
More significant than the IPF/IFF guidance were the many sets of ‘principles, criteria and indicators’ (PC&I) for sustainable forestry. The 1990s may go down in the history of forestry as the decade when foresters – and just about everyone else, it seemed – sought to define, or to prescribe, ‘sustainable forest management’. IIED was there at the beginning of the movement with Duncan Poore's guidelines on natural forests and plantations for ITTO, which were subsequently crafted into C&I. Other country groups followed suit. The Montreal process was kicked off by Canada, which had been a strong protagonist for a convention, and which sought in PC&I a lingua franca to keep international debate going. The Europeans followed with a Helsinki process, the Africans with a ‘Dry Zone’ initiative, and the South Americans with the Tarapoto process.
Spotting a spark of genuine concern for getting to grips with the dimensions of sustainability, IIED worked up Duncan's early idea of ‘Forest Resource Accounting’ for ITTO. This was a simple enough national monitoring protocol to keep track of forests and their management and use, through employing such PC&I. But it proved to be an object lesson in why people do not accept an idea just because it is clever. With no real incentive to broadcast the truth about forests, and without policy processes that encourage learning, many forest authorities were not – and are still not – in the business of tracking and reporting on sustainability. They are in the business, however, of keeping a conversation going between very different countries (the positive view of PC&I) and of applying fig-leaves to vulnerable parts (the uncharitable view).
Where PC&I really did ‘bite’, however, was through certification. From humble beginnings amongst woodworkers and small NGOs in the late 1980s, the idea became a reality when the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was launched in 1993. Its aim is to create market-based incentives for products that can be proven to have been harvested from well-managed forests. The attraction to IIED was that this could open the doors to good forestry and close them to the asset-strippers. With Chris Upton of SGS, the internal audit company, I prepared a book on how certification could and should work, an offering that influenced most of the schemes and many of the players in the early years. IIED has since come to be known as the main independent body tracking whether certification is actually helping forests, stakeholders and trade.
We found that most certified producers are northern, industrial operations or ‘boutique’ tropical producers who were bankrolled by donors and patrons. They were already practising good forestry. In contrast, the valuable qualities of small, community operations in developing countries, which may have been contributing local livelihood and environmental benefits, cannot always be recognized by certification standards. Their complex land-use systems just don't follow the well-documented, ‘scientific’ forest management methods of industrial operations that are more evident to outsider inspectors. Certifiers have their own ideas of how the ‘social’ C&I should look locally, giving rise to some ‘social engineering’.
This might seem to suggest that certification has failed. The truth is far from this. Certification has publicly recognized many good cases of forest management (good news, especially when contrasted to Duncan's depressing findings in 1988). More significantly, multi-stakeholder certification working groups in many countries (tasked with setting the national standard based on FSC's global principles and criteria, or with developing an alternative to FSC) have been debating: What is good forestry? How do we recognize it? How do we hold people accountable? and Are current policies and laws supportive?
This is a big leap forward for institutional change in forestry. A global forest convention may not have been agreed – for good reasons – but FSC offers a new kind of ‘soft’ forest agreement involving ‘real’ players and not just government. If national policy remains the normative statement of forestry officials, then national certification working groups and standards can be seen as a multi-stakeholder forum and set of consensus rules. Forest stakeholders are certainly paying more attention to certification than to the latest international policy initiatives from Washington or Geneva.
Getting involved in the business of forestry
From the 1980s to Rio, it was assumed that governments would lead us on paths towards sustainability. But policy has subsequently opened out to other players with different attributes to offer. With increasing NGO and business influence in policy, ostensibly for sustainable forestry, it is no wonder that their mandates and accountability are increasingly being questioned. The late 1990s was the period when IIED decided it had to get to know the private sector better.
Erling Lorentzen, the chairman of Aracruz Celulose, a huge Brazilian paper company, had become worried by rumours of impending European legislation to make domestic paper recycling mandatory and penalize virgin fibre imports. Surely this would prejudice against sustainable land use and employment in Brazil? In any case, would recycling not entail huge energy costs in Europe? These questions made it evident that there was no good way of judging the multiple trade-offs involved in paper production and consumption.
Through the WBCSD, Erling got together with several forestry and paper companies, as well as concerned European governments, to commission an independent review of the sustainable paper cycle from IIED. Richard Sandbrook's involvement ensured a high profile, and an (at times) sweltering political climate for the project.
The result: we showed what a huge environmental clean-up had been made by the bigger players, mainly for self-interest (and the win-wins have not been exhausted); we highlighted their more significant social challenges; and we drew attention to the dangers of defining ‘good practice’ only in terms of what the big players can do. However, we made the mistake of not designing a change-management and monitoring programme to commit the companies to improvements. (We have learned this lesson and are applying it in the project on mining, minerals and sustainable development. )
None the less, the report remains the big milestone, the Domesday Book, the BC/AD, of the global paper industry.7 It is frequently quoted, including by the industry. We have since gone on to review ‘instruments for sustainable private sector forestry’ – different forms of company-community partnership, and markets for forest environmental services, as well as certification. In five countries, we are examining policy and market signals along the commodity chain between producer and consumer, finally doing what Duncan had envisaged for the very first IIED policy reviews.
A new focus on governance challenges
So IIED has contributed to the search for sustainable forest management, on the ground, in language, in agreements, and in forging multi-stakeholder partnerships that give all a better chance to get the forests they want. Many of the paths we blazed are now more approximately paved by others. But if we were to collect up all the ‘magic bullets’ fired in the international forest games of the past twenty years, by IIED and by others, they would still not offer all that is required for sustainable forestry. Present attitudes and institutions are still ill-adapted to the nature and scope of the problems, and we need a more robust governance system.
Thus two challenges now stand before IIED. They concern the difficult terrain thrown up when the ‘tectonic plates’ of globalization and localization collide – a landscape of both tough peaks and of fertile valleys.
First, the powerful extra-sectoral forces that cause forest problems have not really been tamed, although IIED has been in the vanguard in analysing them. They are treated as an ‘act of god’ by forest inhabitants and forest authorities alike. As David Kaimowitz, Director of CIFOR8 pointed out in an IIED/CIFOR workshop on ‘Policy that works for forests and people’, foresters persist in formulating forestry-based solutions to what are really extra-sectoral problems, which are therefore bound to fail. I would add that the ‘bigger’ initiatives for sustainable development – which could possibly tame the extra-sectoral forces – are not necessarily informed by good forestry.
Second, and often at the local level, we need to redress the imbalance between those who hold the power and those who have high potential or a critical need for better forestry (who are often the weaker groups).
Both of these challenges are governance issues. (Curiously, I have seen a colourful sticker with the deeply unsexy message: ‘forests are a governance issue’. While this is a step forward from ‘save the rainforests’, it is hardly a communications triumph.) For forestry, governance is complicated by the fact that forests do not define a ‘sector’ in the normal sense, with neat institutional boundaries. They are resources which other sectors and ordinary people use, and they use them in ways which reflect how society is organized, divides its wealth, produces and consumes. This reality explains why IIED's Forestry and Land Use Programme is not a separate institution. Its purpose lies within IIED, with experts and networks in economics and trade, and with leaders in local, corporate and global governance. It is from these alliances that the next generation of IIED innovations for forestry will surely spring.
NOTES
1Dasmann, R, Milton J and P. Freeman. (1973) Ecological Principles for Economic Development International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, Morges, Switzerland and the Conservation Foundation, Washington DC.
2Poore, Duncan (1976) Ecological Guidelines for Development in Tropical Rain Forests. IUCN, Morges, Switzerland.
3IUCN, UNEP and WWF (1980) The World Conservation Strategy. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland.
4World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
5Poore, Duncan, Ross M and Setyono S. (1985) A review of policies affecting forest lands in Indonesia. Paper delivered at the 9th World Forestry Congress, Mexico City.
6Our overall conclusions are in James Mayers and Stephen Bass (1999)Policy that Works for Forests and People. Series Overview. IIED, London
7Dubois, Olivier (1996) The Sustainable Paper Cycle. WBCSD, Geneva and IIED, London.
8Centre for International Forest Research, Indonesia.