Louis Putzel

Formalization as Development in Land and Natural Resource Policy

Responding to multiple problems affecting governance of natural resource access and trade, governments implement formalization processes, often driven by the interests of development agencies. In so doing, they interact with the contemporary political, social, and environmental contexts in which resources are extracted, produced, and traded. They also contend with histories of ownership, access rights, market configurations, and practices attached to resources and the lands in which they are located. As development policy, formalization frequently materializes as top-down restructuring based on current social and environmental norms. However, its adoption is often unsuccessful and entails risks including leakage, barriers to small or poor actors, elite capture, and negative effects on women or marginalized groups. The insights herein are informative to current processes of formalization associated with the European Union (EU) timber trade regime and other resource governance efforts. At the minimum, incorporation of adaptive approaches and user-accountable monitoring in such processes are recommended.

Studies on forest landscape restoration in hilly and mountainous regions of Asia and Africa – an introduction to the Special Issue

The field of forest landscape restoration (FLR) is quickly gaining traction now that national commitments to restore degraded lands under the 2011 Bonn Challenge have reached upwards of 160 million ha. While the growing literature on FLR and associated methodologies being proposed emphasizes the importance of including stakeholders in decision making and implementation, local communities in hilly and mountainous regions often face particular challenges. The papers in this Special Issue of the International Forestry Review shed light on some of the approaches incorporated in FLR design and its outcomes in cases from China, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. These include direct subsidies or PES, land distributions and devolution of resource rights, engagement of communities in participatory management, and other approaches. Taken together, the studies in this Special Issue bring together a range of insights into the diversity of approaches favoring the implementation of FLR, particularly in sloping landscapes, under varying social and ecological conditions.

Estimating water user demand for certification of forest watershed services

Eco-certification is one solution to the common problem of verification of delivery of services in payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Certification incurs costs, which may limit uptake, so it should be able to benefit users of certified services for it succeeds. In part to inform a project targeting expansion of the Forest Stewardship Councils forest management certification to include ecosystem services, we tested market demand for a potential certification scheme for watershed services. Using choice experiments among end-users of water subject to an existing PES scheme in Lombok, Indonesia, we assessed potential business values of certification. Our results suggested that preferred business values included credible information disclosure on improved water quality, reduced flood risk, environmental safeguards, and/or social safeguards of the upstream forests. These preferences indicate potential demand for a certification of forest watershed services designed to provide such information to end users.

Temporal Reliability of Willingness to Pay for Payments for Environmental Services: Lessons from Lombok, Indonesia

Willingness to pay (WTP) for payments for environmental services (PES) can be temporarily reliable if contingent valuation (CV) studies are embedded in an accurate survey population, yield low measurement errors, and are based on a correct assumption of no change in sociodemographic factors affecting buyer preferences. These pre-conditions are assumed in PES schemes applying temporal reliability of WTP. This study tests these conditions in CV-PES studies from 2001, 2003, and 2011 in Lombok, Indonesia, by comparing them with a new CV-PES study in 2015. Our results show that the CV-PES studies would not meet the pre-conditions due to inclusion of non-PES buyers, potential measurement errors implied by a lack of validating information and high WTP estimate, and/or failure to test the condition of no change of socio-economic factors. Results contribute to identifying pragmatic challenges and lessons for applying temporal reliability of WTP to PES implementation.