Environmental governance

Forestry provides an important entry point for governance initiatives. The very factors that make forestry such a challenging sector also mean that it offers valuable ways of understanding governance, governance failures, and assessing the impacts of public policies on the poor and the environment.

Forestry has the capacity to work at the local, national and international levels in ways that few other sectors can. It also engages powerful industrial forces in different parts of the world.

Our programme is working to demonstrate how progress in the forest sector, in areas such as public participation, accountability, the rule of law, public sector service delivery and decentralisation, can leverage far wider gains in good governance, environmental stewardship and pro-poor change. Key areas of Programme involvement include:

• Global forest policy, including multilateral environmental agreements;
• National forest programmes and sector-wide approaches;
• Forest and environmental dimensions of poverty reduction strategies;
• Environmental democracy and environmental rights;
• Forest sector regulation in a framework of equity;
• The governance and poverty impacts of illegal logging;
• Community involvement in forest management;
• Platforms for pro-poor research and natural resource management.