Kathleen McGinley

The ecological sustainability of tropical forest management: evaluation of the national forest management standards of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, with emphasis on the need for adaptive management

From a conceptual point of view, national forest management standards in Latin American countries have progressed significantly in recent years.Examples include the Costa Rican Standards and Procedures for Sustainable Forest Management and Certification, developed by the National Commission for Forest Certification and in Nicaragua, the National Institute of Forestry proposal of principles, criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management.In line with general approaches worldwide, these national standards primarily focus on the fulfillment of sound forest practice.There is comparatively little emphasis on the assessment of management outcomes or changes in key components of the eco- and social-systems that result from management impacts.Essentially, there is little emphasis on adaptive management, though arguments that management cannot be sustainable if it is not adaptive are persuasive. This study sought to contribute to the development of standards that include elements for adaptive management that define, communicate and evaluate sustainable forest management in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.Elements from the national standards and the CIFOR generic CI the innovation and application of a practical, applicable and scientifically based methodology for developing national level CI and acceptance of this methodology by key players in the fields of forest management and policy.These experiences and the resulting proposals of C&I for the evaluation of ecologically sustainable forest management are expected to be used as points of reference for future development of forest policy in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and to contribute to the overall understanding of C&I development processes in the region.

Governmental Forest Policy for Sustainable Forest Management in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua: Regulation, Implementation, and Impact

We evaluated how governmental forest regulation in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua has succeeded or failed in fostering changes in forest owner and user behavior that enhance the sustainability of tropical forest management. As expected, sufficient resources and capacity for forest policy implementation are crucial for attaining governmental forest policy objectives, but innovative arrangements for promoting, enforcing, and verifying policy compliance can compensate for limited regulatory resources and processes. The findings also indicate that: the level of governmental commitment to sustainable forest management (SFM) was as important as total funding levels; a mix of government rules and incentives enhanced adoption of SFM; the incorporation of professional forest regents offset limited agency capacity; and forest certification enhanced SFM on forest concessions. Local level inducements and constraints that enhance or impede governmental forest policy adoption and compliance also were identified.

Towards durable multistakeholder-generated solutions: The pilot application of a problem-oriented policy learning protocol to legality verification and community rights in Peru

SUMMARY This paper reports and reflects on the pilot application of an 11-step policy learning protocol that was developed by Cashore and Lupberger (2015) based on several years of Cashores multi-author collaborations. The protocol was applied for the first time in Peru in 2015 and 2016 by the IUFRO Working Party on Forest Policy Learning Architectures (hereinafter referred to as the project team). The protocol integrates insights from policy learning scholarship (Hall 1993, Sabatier 1999) with Bernstein and Cashores (2000, 2012) four pathways of influence framework. The pilot implementation in Peru focused on how global timber legality verification interventions might be harnessed to promote local land rights. Legality verification focuses attention on the checking and auditing of forest management units in order to verify that timber is harvested and traded in compliance with the law. We specifically asked: How can community legal ownership of, and access to, forestland and forest resources be enhanced? The protocol was designed as a dynamic tool, the implementation of which fosters iterative rather than linear processes. It directly integrated two objectives: 1) identifying the causal processes through which global governance initiatives might be harnessed to produce durable results ‘on the ground’; 2) generating insights and strategies in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. This paper reviews and critically evaluates our work in designing and piloting the protocol. We assess what seemed to work well and suggest modifications, including an original diagnostic framework for nurturing durable change. We also assess the implications of the pilot application of the protocol for policy implementation that works to enhance the influence of existing international policy instruments, rather than contributing to fragmentation and incoherence by creating new ones.

Examining Forest Governance in the United States Through the Montréal Process Criteria and Indicators Framework

SUMMARY This paper examines laws, policies, organizations and other governance elements and arrangements that influence forest conservation and sustainable resource management in the U.S. through a set of 10 Indicators associated with Criterion Seven of the Montréal Process Criteria and Indicators Framework. The applicability and utility of these indicators as a measure of forest governance at the national level is examined and associated quantitative and qualitative data are presented and discussed. In the U.S., a broad range of laws governs public lands, dictating management processes and practices. Federal and state laws protect wildlife and endangered species on all public and private lands, and foster a range of prescribed and voluntary forest practices to protect water, air, and other public goods and services on private lands. Federal and state laws also provide for technical and financial assistance, research, education, and planning on private forest lands. Market based mechanisms increasingly are used to advance forest sustainability, as are policies, programs, and partnerships that link related policy networks, purposes, and desired outcomes across an expanding range of sectors. Nevertheless, challenges in advancing forest sustainability in the U.S. remain, particularly where incentives for sustainable forest management are low and pressures for development and agriculture are high. Furthermore, while such multilateral agreements help identify common forest goals, develop metrics, and report individual country status, they by no means enforce specific forest practices or ensure good forest governance.

Current Perspectives on Sustainable Forest Management: North America

Purpose of ReviewIncreased availability of current forest resource information provides an opportunity to evaluate the continued concerns about forest sustainability in North America. The purpose of this study is to assess and discuss the current state and trends of North American forest resources, sustainable forest management, and their implications for forest sustainability.Recent FindingsRecent information indicates that forest sustainability in North America is not under threat. Forest area, inventory, and carbon stocks have been increasing while wood harvest has been declining. Large expanses of forest resources are covered by management plans, and many forests are certified. The areas of concern include forest fires and bark beetle infestations in primarily public forests in the western USA and Canada, and continued loss of forest cover in Mexico.SummaryDespite progress made in gathering information on forest resources, evaluating forest sustainability remains challenging. Practicing sustainable forest management is made difficult by unfavorable market conditions and the ensuing lack of funding, challenges in developing and implementing forest management plans, and uncertainties including potential impacts of climate change, population growth, and changing markets.

Implementation of the U.S. Legal, Institutional, and Economic Criterion and Indicators for the 2010 Montreal Process for Sustainable Forest Management

At the 1992 United Nations “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, most of the countries in the world, including the United States, agreed to international accords to protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change. However, they could not agree on a convention for forests, because developing countries wanted to preserve their autonomy and sovereign control of their forest resources, and developed countries would not guarantee them financial support to protect their forests (Humpheys 2006). This failure eventually led to the development of multi-lateral forest agreements and treaties to at least measure and monitor forest sustainability through Sustainable Forest Management Criteria and Indicators (SFM CI similarly, the development of forest certification systems were a non-state market driven response (Cashore et al. 2004). SFM C&I processes have since been developed to measure and monitor various conditions of forest sustainability at the national or regional level. Forest certification, on the other hand, was developed to also measure SFM, but at the forest management unit level. Many efforts have been made to harmonize national-level SFM C&I with national forest certification efforts, particularly in Europe. These various efforts at measuring, monitoring, and encouraging SFM address biophysical, economic, and social aspects of forest systems. Many of the C&I efforts have made considerable progress at tracking biophysical characteristics of forests, but the measurement and monitoring of legal and institutional features has developed more slowly. Furthermore, determining whether we are achieving SFM, in general, and if our laws and institutions are helping, in particular, is difficult to ascertain. In this book chapter, we discuss the development of one criterion of SFM C&I in the United States—the Legal, Institutional, and Economic Criterion and Indicators for the 2010 Montreal Process for Sustainable Forest Management (Criterion 7). This criterion has the