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note: this blog entry is reproduced from an NUS Geography Independent Study Module paper on community forestry, submitted in end-2017

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1. Introduction

Forests provide a multitude of benefits at various scales. Locally, they provide livelihoods and cultural identities for forest-dependent communities. Regionally, they provide ecosystem services such as watershed protection and biodiversity conservation. At the global scale, forests provide the raw materials for the timber and pulp industries. To balance these objectives, neoliberal instruments have been developed to steer the direction of forest use and management. These include forest certification and legality initiatives, and payments for ecosystem services (PES).

 

More recently in the past two decades, forests have been recognised as a means of carbon sequestration and storage and have been incorporated into the international carbon discourse. The main framework to steer forest governance towards meeting carbon-related objectives is the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme, a form of PES. While Seymour and Busch (2016) argue that REDD+ can also meet biodiversity and livelihood outcomes and should be further proliferated with larger financial and political investments, McDermott (2017) cautioned that more nuanced and context-specific approaches, rather than a singular focus on carbon financing, are required for effective and equitable forest management, simply because dimensions of power and risk are inextricable from the local realities of forest management.

 

This cautionary note is particularly resounding for at least approximately 20% of the world’s forests[1], which are managed via community-based forestry regimes, and for about a third of the world’s population, who rely on forests for their livelihoods (FAO, 2017). While community-based forestry (CBF) regimes have the potential to achieve both improved livelihoods and sustainable forest management, on-the-ground operational challenges means that layering on additional expectations such as meeting PES or REDD+ targets could unhelpfully over-burden CBF (FAO, 2016a).

 

This paper aims to assess the extent to which contemporary global forest policy initiatives makes sense to CBF regimes. By ‘making sense’, I refer to whether contemporary global forest policy initiatives are aligned to, and help further, CBF’s agenda of sustainable forest management and livelihood improvement. After introducing CBF, I will explore the main instruments of contemporary global forest policies, i.e. forest certifications and legality initiatives, and PES. A range of instruments are considered, as opposed to focussing only on REDD+, for greater breadth.

 

2. Community-based forestry

The concept of community-based forestry (CBF), or community forestry, was first mainstreamed about forty years ago, when the FAO launched its seminal paper on Forestry for Local Community Development in 1978 (FAO, 1978). Over the years, it has gained traction because it offers an alternative to the failures of centralised management to control deforestation (e.g. fortress conservation), its coherence with larger economy-wide and institutional reforms to reduce government spending, and its ability to meet increasing demands for greater community involvement in natural resource governance (FAO, 2016a). These were fuelled by the popular narrative by Ostrom (1990) that local communities can autonomously organise and develop local institutions to manage natural resources sustainably if they are given sufficient property rights over local forest commons. In developing countries, CBF was welcomed because of its potential to improve rural livelihoods in addition to reducing forest degradation (FAO, 2016a). More recently, the push to recognise the fundamental rights of indigenous and local communities over traditional lands and natural resources has also strengthened the concept of CBF as a politically-legitimate and humanistic mode of forest management (FAO, 2016a).

 

While the motivations behind CBF may evolve, the persistent characteristic of CBF is the idea of some level of participation by smallholders and community groups in the planning and implementation of forest management (FAO, 2016a). Hajjar et al (2016) broadly defines CBF as “forest use and governance arrangements under which the rights, responsibilities and authority for forest management rest, at least in part, with local communities,” in traditional or endogenous forms as well as in the form of initiatives introduced by NGOs, governments or other external parties. This broad definition means that CBF can range from passive participation in government programmes (e.g. participatory conservation or joint forest management) on one end of the spectrum to active control by communities (e.g. fully-devolved community forestry or private ownership) on the other end of the spectrum, as the number of and strength of rights accorded to the community increases (FAO, 2016a). Accordingly, the types of rights granted to the community is reflective of the government’s level of trust in community and the outcomes it wishes out of CBF. For example, in border areas where citizenship is contested, it is rare for governments to fully devolve management rights and land ownership to the community. Desired outcomes could range from improving rural livelihoods, sustaining a local community’s spiritual or cultural identity, to co-opting the community to protect the forest for the government. Whereas the former outcome is more likely achieved by encouraging active control by communities, the latter outcome simply requires the community’s participation in the government’s programme.

 

CBF is often positioned as ‘the local community’ versus ‘the other power’ – the government, a multi-national company, an external aid agency, etc. However, it is worth noting that ‘the local community’ is not one homogenous entity, but a group with its own internal dynamics and politics. The CBF regime of granting property rights to individual households may instead accentuate divisions within the ‘community’: for example, in Japan where individual property rights are strong, owners can sell the trees in their private forests to logging companies, and the involvement and coordination of municipal-level forest associations are required to avoid unintended systems-scale impacts such as landslides (Tanaka and Inoue, 2016). The devolvement of forest management rights to the community may also result in uneven development between households: Moktan et al (2016) found that household income varied between the rich and poor households in two cases of CBF in Bhutan, and recommended that CBF interventions should also ensure an even playing field between households of differing capital. Hence, a fundamental premise behind Ostrom’s proposition that local communities can autonomously organise to sustainably manage natural resources if they are given sufficient property rights, therefore, is that there are mediating actors who can enable local institutional norms to persist, steer the community towards a common goal, and even out differences between individuals within the community. In endogenous or traditional CBF, this role is taken up by the community leaders or elders; whereas leaders could be (self-)appointed in externally-initiated CBF. External parties may also play a role in supporting or influencing this role, particularly in times of demographic changes or external pressures. For example, rural villages in Japan are predominantly elderly and benefit from an infusion of younger residents to steer the community (Tanaka and Inoue, 2016). In Brazil, the adoption of the Forest Stewardship Council certification by smallholders is facilitated by NGOs like the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) (McDermott et al, 2015).

 

Although the outcomes of CBF have been mixed and its effectiveness difficult to evaluate (Hajjar et al, 2016; FAO, 2016a), CBF is promoted by many conservation and development practitioners as model of state-community partnership to meet the dual goals of improving rural livelihood and sustainable forest management (Moktan et al, 2016). For CBF to achieve these aims, the requisite conditions are secure tenure, an enabling regulatory framework, strong governance, viable technology, adequate market knowledge and a supportive bureaucracy (FAO, 2016a). These conditions should be viewed through the milieu of the day-to-day realities faced by local communities. For example, externally-initiated CBF should provide good forests for the community to begin with: in Vietnam, because degraded forestland is was allocated, communities instead choose to continue to illegally harvest from the conserved, special use forests (Dam and Barber, 2015); in Bhutan, the Department of Forests had to allocate 50% timber-stocked forests from state forests alongside 50% degraded forests to incentivise community forest management groups to take over the management and reforestation and degraded forest areas (Moktan et al, 2016). Moreover, Nurrochmat et al (2016) argued that trees are viewed by local communities in Indonesia as a financial safety net and not a product with planned yields. These are among some of the complexities which hinders the linkage of CBF with contemporary global forest policies, which I will discuss in the next sections.

 

3. Contemporary global forest policy initiatives

If the strength of governance is judged by having one hegemonic institution that defines the direction and oversees the implementation and enforcement of activities, then the existing state of global forest governance is weak. Presently, only the United Nations Forum on Forests exists, but it is at best only a platform for discussion; on the other hand, frameworks like the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change do discuss the topic of forests, but often only with respect to their respective aims of biodiversity conservation or climate change mitigation (Bhagwat and Humphries, 2017). This reflects the nature of forests as places which provide multiple benefits, perhaps even as contested places when these benefits increase in salience and compete against one another. Considering that one-third of the world’s population depend on forests, it is little wonder that Kanowski et al (2011) argued that, while adequately-defined international frameworks should exist to provide guidance, implementation of programmes like REDD+ should be organic, locally-empowering and accompanied by capacity-building. Likewise, Bhagwat and Humphries (2017) recommend bottom-up frameworks which involves local coalitions of actors combined with social learning.

 

Nonetheless, between 1990 and 2015, the area of the world’s forests dwindled by 129 million hectares (FAO, 2016b), and there is an urgent need to safeguard forests, whether against rampant exploitation by logging companies or against degradation due to land use change. In this respect, certification and legality initiatives as well as PES are the two main forest policy instruments that have emerged. As products of their time, they are designed to operate within, and have the associated shortcomings of, a paradigm of neoliberal economics.

 

• Forest certification and legality initiatives

Certifications are voluntary, non-state market-driven mechanisms that developed out of the lack of credibility about industry self-regulation, the increase in stakeholder influence and the change in norms about good industry governance to emphasise collaboration and partnership (Tuppura et al, 2016). The first forest certification was launched by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in 1993, with the idea of attaching a “green” label to forest products produced according to standards of responsible and sustainable forest products. (McDermott et al, 2015). Third-party assessors to ensure that global-scale and national-scale FSC standards are met from the forest product’s origin to its point of sale, and environmentally-conscious consumers could then exercise their purchasing power by choosing certified wood products (McDermott, 2015). Following the launch of the NGO-led FSC certification, other competing certification schemes were formed by forest industry associations and wood producer groups in key wood-producing countries, and some these were gradually subsumed under the umbrella Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC) from 1999 onwards. Examples of voluntary nationally-determined certification standards aligned to the PEFC framework are the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme (MTCS) which was endorsed by the PEFC in 2009 (Lewis and Davis, 2015), and the certification under Japan’s Sustainable Green Ecosystem Council (SGEC) which is deemed more appropriate than the FSC certification for Japan’s context of overgrown artificial forestry (email interview, 2017b).

 

Forest certification schemes aim to boost the brand image of forest-related products and are voluntary in nature. This could explain why only 10% of the world’s forests are certified, and only 95% of the certified forests are based in temperate countries where business operating frameworks are clearer (Tuppura et al, 2016) when the original intention of forest certification is to counter deforestation in the tropics (McDermott, et al, 2015). To address the challenge of getting logging companies or wood suppliers to ‘opt in’, legality initiatives exist set the minimum benchmark before any forest-related product can be traded on the market. The most notable legality initiative is the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan and Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA). Developed in 2003 to limit illegal timber being imported into the EU, FLEGT-VPAs may be voluntarily entered between the EU and the government of a timber-producing and trading partner country, but becomes legally binding when the agreement is ratified by both parties (Mustalahti et al, 2017). Since Indonesia and the EU signed the FLEFT-VPA in 2013, the Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu (SVLK) has emerged as a national-scale legality initiative to ensure that forest products in Indonesia meet the requirements of the FLEGT-VPA before being exported to the EU (Nurrochmat et al, 2016).

 

Both forest certification schemes and legality initiatives aim to ultimately promote sustainable forest management by targeting the production process of the forest-related product. They acknowledge the existence of the global industry of timber and other forest-related products, and aim to influence processes in the industry by developing standards of acceptability, e.g. the legality of the origin of the wood, and reduced-impact logging as a best management practice. As such, they are particularly relevant in countries with a significant commercial forestry sector, e.g. Indonesia and Japan, but not so in Bhutan (email interview, 2017a).

 

• Payments for ecosystem services (PES)

Unlike forest certification and legality initiatives which seek to govern the production processes of forest-related products, the interest of PES lies in the environmental services of forestland. These include watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration and storage.

 

There is no known start date of the idea of PES, but literature suggests that it emerged in the 2000s (FAO, 2016a; Hahn et al, 2015). Essentially, PES is “a mechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services” (Engel et al, 2008), i.e. that the beneficiaries of environmental services make direct, contractual and conditional payments to relevant landholders in return for adopting ecosystem conservation and restoration practices. PES has the most potential to be applied where there is a need to protect large forests for their ecosystem services, by incentivising the relevant landholders to maintain or improve the conditions of their forests to deliver certain environmental services.

 

At the national level, PES schemes have been developed for watershed and landscape beauty protection. Since 2010, Vietnam requires users of forest environmental services (forest users e.g. water supply companies, hydropower plants, tourism companies) to make fixed payments to suppliers of these services (forest owners e.g. individuals, households, communities and organisations holding titles to forestland); the rates to be paid are pegged by the government to the commercial or production outputs of the forest users (FAO, 2016a). These PES payments supplement the state budgets for forest protection, and have the potential to strengthen much-needed incentives to engage local stakeholders in forest management initiatives (email interview, 2017c).

 

At the global scale, a renowned PES scheme is the United Nations’ REDD+ programme, in which developed nations can pay forest-rich developing nations to reduce their carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and to enhance their forest carbon stocks. There has been much debate over REDD+, ranging from whether it perversely incentivises the replacement of old-growth forests with newly-planted forest stands, whether  deforestation and forest degradation leads to significant carbon emissions (for example, carbon is still stored in wood that is used as furniture), to whether the programme adequately addresses the underlying drivers of forest loss. Nonetheless, since 2008, Norway has committed large amounts of finances to Brazil, Guyana, Indonesia, Peru and Liberia (Seymour et al, 2015). Although Norway eventually withheld payments because Indonesia fell short of its targets, Seymour et al (2015) argue that the performance-based nature of the payments accompanied by satellite monitoring technologies makes REDD+ a favourable programme: the preparatory work undertaken has helped to gradually transform Indonesia’s sluggish institutions, the large sums of money at stake (up to US$1 billion) has garnered significant support within the Indonesian bureaucracy, and payor’s right of non-payment for non-performance sends a strong signal to the payee about the importance of the deliverables.

 

Yet, PES faces several conceptual difficulties. The most common critique is that PES is based on the premise that nature can be commodified. Hahn et al (2015) points out that there are various levels of commodifying nature, of which the lowest level could be based on regulatory instead of monetary instruments, and subsidy-like PES paid by governments and market-based PES constitute higher levels of commodifying nature. However, until clear markets are formed for particular environmental services, the determination of the PES amount will not be completely market-based. When markets do form, it is imperative to avoid the over-commodification of nature, such as the development of forest bonds and biodiversity derivatives (Hahn et al, 2015). This is these financial instruments operate within a completely different set of rules from natural world, e.g. the idea of credits and derivatives does not apply in nature. Moreover, there needs to be clarity on the types of forest ecosystem services that are being pursued (Newton et al, 2016), such that should a market develop for one kind of ecosystem service but not the others (e.g. carbon storage and sequestration but not biodiversity conservation), appropriate safeguards would be implemented to ensure that the other types of forest ecosystem services are not neglected.

 

Furthermore, because of the existing difficulty of determining payment amounts, subsidy-like PES should ideally be designed such that the benefits from PES are just greater than the benefits from pursuing business-as-usual (Graham et al, 2016) or from pursuing another land use alternative. The PES amount could be modest if the situation to be avoided is the conversion of forestland to small-scale agriculture; but it could exponentially increase beyond available budgets if the issue to be avoided is the conversion to large-scale oil palm plantations. More presciently, where there is no issue with business-as-usual and there is no alternative situation to be avoided, applying PES would seem no more than a case of ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.

 

4. Global forest policy initiatives and CBF

• Relevance of certification and legality initiatives to CBF

By virtue that certification and legality initiatives aim to govern the production processes of forest-related products, they should logically be the most related to CBF regimes where communities engage with the markets to sell timber and other forest-related products. On the flipside, they would not be applicable to CBF regimes where communities depend on forests solely for subsistence, e.g. forms of participatory conservation where the communities are only allowed to harvest non-timber forest products. This suggests that there is more relevance to CBF regimes where the community’s rights to manage the forest are stronger, as the community would be able to self-organise to determine how to engage the markets. In Indonesia, property rights for smallholders are well-defined, and since domestic certification standards are well-accepted in the local markets, meeting these certification standards helps to boost the legality and hence saleability of smallholders’ timber products within both the domestic and international markets (Nurrochmat, 2016). In tandem with certification standards and legality initiatives that are robust, strong and well-defined tenure can provide conditions for CBF to achieve both livelihood improvement and sustainable forest management.

 

However, an assumption is that communities have the sufficient market knowledge and capacity engage in the forest certification scheme. Certification of timber products from CBF has required extensive financial and technical support (Pokorny et al, 2010). Additional effort and costs are required to participate in certification programmes, which highlights the nature of certification schemes as controlling the production process without channelling additional financial gains to the producer (Nurrochmat et al, 2016). Moreover, certification offers the benefits of improved brand image to companies, and this may not be the concern of smallholders involved in CBF. Cases where community forests have been certified are likely facilitated by a mission-oriented and less profit-driven forest certifier (Pinto and McDermott, 2013).

 

In addition, while certification schemes set the desirable environmental standards, these are often geared towards influencing large-scale forest plantations. Even if communities have the requisite market knowledge and capacity to engage in the forest certification process, they may not have advantage over the larger companies: a family-run slow-growing woodlot, for example, would meet the same certification standards as a forest monoculture plantation (McDermott, 2015). To enable market differentiation, the design and criteria of forest certification schemes could be adapted to accentuate the additional environmental values of CBF regimes, such as the socio-cultural values which also promote the sustainable forestry. Tweaks in forest certification schemes are already happening: for example, the FSC has already started to move beyond the certification of wood products towards piloting forest certification for forest ecosystem services, and certification of easily-quantifiable services such as biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and non-timber forest products seem to have the most acceptability amongst stakeholders of the certification value chain (Juang et al, 2016). However, Lewis and Davis (2015) and Sahide et al (2016) have observed industry players are reluctant to adopt more environmentally-sustainable criteria such as the protection of high conservation-value forests. Forest certification for CBF could also be met with similar inertia. Moreover, any specification of best management practices for community forests needs should account for the range of CBF types and the diversity of socio-cultural values between communities.  It is therefore uncertain whether a universally-applicable forest certification for CBF can be developed, or whether differentiation of CBF products would rely on numerous small-scale case-specific efforts. An example of such an effort is a researcher-developed mobile phone application for an environmentally-conscious guitar company in the USA to show to its customers the specific community forests in Guatemala from which it obtains the wood for making its guitars (McDermott, 2015).

 

With little incentive for community forests to partake in certification schemes, legality initiatives which set the minimum acceptable standards for forest products may instead help to reinforce the thread of sustainable forest management in CBF. However, it is important to consider the day-to-day milieu of the communities when designing legality initiatives. For example, McDermott et al (2015) argue that international legality initiatives which focus on traceability of forest products, and if well-enforced by the state, may squeeze out local producers, simply because timber supply chains from small-scale forestry are very fragmented and difficult to track. Hence, the overzealous tightening of legality initiatives, whilst theoretically beneficial for the environment, may unintentionally blindside local communities.

 

Given the above constraints, how can CBF be steered towards more sustainable forest management? Ostrom’s proposition that local communities with sufficient property rights can self-organise to manage their resources sustainably may not always hold true, particularly if the community is undergoing change. For example, vast areas of smallholder forestland in Laos have been converted to monoculture rubber plantations due to the influence of Chinese rubber companies. Environmental NGOs may work with local communities to steer them towards more sustainable forest management practices, but often these are ad-hoc. I think that forestry companies could help to fill this space. As profit-driven entities, they are concerned by their brand image, hence would more likely participate in forest certification scheme to project corporate responsibility to consumers. However, operational constraints mean that they need to work with small-scale forest owners. Table 1 outlines the potential synergies that can be achieved in Japanese and Indonesian contexts. The forestry companies’ concurrent participation in forest certification schemes means that they are more likely to stipulate best management practices when collaborating with the local communities. In contexts like Indonesia’s, this could lead to social learning within communities about sustainable forest management practices.

 

Nonetheless, the collaborative frameworks described in Table 1 are only possible where there is secure tenure for local communities. This is not always the case for communities in frontier regions, where rights to customary forestland have not yet been granted due to reasons such as government oversight (Dam and Barber, 2015). Without secure tenure, the need for companies to respect local communities use of forestland is diminished, and could even negatively result in the displacement of local communities from their customary land. Fundamentally, private companies are fundamentally profit-driven entities whose actions are greatly influenced by the existing governance regimes of the countries they operate in. Of the FAO (2016)’s six requisite conditions for successful CBF, private companies can contribute by providing viable technology and adequate market knowledge, but governments still need to provide the other conditions of secure tenure, enabling regulatory frameworks, strong governance and a supportive bureaucracy.

 

	Japan	Indonesia
Operational constraint for forestry company	Scarce land for plantation forestry	Insufficient manpower to manage large tracts of forestland
Opportunity from working with local communities	Renting the right to plant and manage forests from privately-owned forests	Providing trees saplings to local communities for planting on their own land, and subsequently purchasing the timber from the local communities when the trees have matured.
Potential benefit to local communities	By amalgamating the management of scattered, small privately-owned forests, forestry companies can improve the situation of under-managed forests which has arisen due to the ageing rural population. Benefits can then be transferred to the local communities.	Additional income for local communities.
Table 1: Synergies from collaboration between private forestry companies and small-scale forest owners or local communities with well-defined property rights. Insights are drawn from an email interview with employee of a forestry company (email interview, 2017b).

 

• Relevance of PES to CBF

PES governs the environmental services from forestland, and intuitively would be the most relevant to CBF when communities fully manage or own their own land. However, in practice, PES schemes are frequently managed by government bodies, and so are evidenced mostly on the other side of the spectrum of CBF typologies, i.e. where communities are involved in participatory conservation or the joint management of forests. In instances like these in Vietnam, PES payments provide the government with additional monetary resources employ forest-dependent local communities in the protection of watershed or conservation forests (email interview, 2017c). Simplistically, PES offers the promise of meeting CBF’s dual aims of sustainable forest protection and livelihood improvement: local communities earn income which they would otherwise get from logging or the conversion of forestland for agricultural production, while the forests are protected. Further, if the payments are pegged to measurable performance indicators for desired environmental services, it is also possible to steer supposedly rational, well-informed communities towards optimising these environmental services.

 

However, unless PES can be operationalised such that payments go directly to local forest-dependent communities, the applicability of PES to CBF will remain limited to CBF modalities with government involvement. While it is important for the government to fill the intermediary role in managing the PES payments and disbursing it to the community, whether as cash hand-outs or in the form of infrastructure improvements, it is also equally plausible for local community leaders to fulfil this role. While on the one hand, there is practical scepticism about whether the community can properly manage additional incoming funds, the reliance on government bodies also invites criticisms that PES benefits do not trickle down to the local people.

 

Capacity-building within local communities is therefore necessary, and should happen at a couple of levels. The first is to familiarise local communities involved in about the mechanics of PES – if the PES scheme they are involved in is managed by the government, this will at least empower them with knowledge to hold the government accountable. For example, the community should have the right to query if they discover that a downstream hydropower company involved in a government-mediated PES scheme to pay for the watershed services provided by their forest. The second, more practical need for capacity-building is if the PES schemes are of an easily-quantifiable performance-based nature. REDD+, with its focus on forest carbon, is one such scheme. The advent of REDD+ has not only given rise to numerous REDD+ preparatory activities for governments to acquire the requisite technical knowledge and set up the relevant institutions (e.g. in Laos and Bhutan (Boutthavang et al, 2017; email interview, 2017a), but has also led to several capacity-building projects for local communities. For example, The Samdhana Institute has carried out projects to prepare indigenous peoples, local communities and other community-based organisations for REDD+ policy and implementation in Indonesia and Myanmar, and is pursuing the strategy of securing land rights for communities in Indonesia’s frontier province of Papua (The Samdhana Institute, 2017). The latter could be reflective of concerns that REDD+ implementation could lead to governments’ takeover of customary, ecologically-rich forestland to maximise the state’s benefits from REDD+.

 

While the above discussion has focussed on the administrative role of the government to manage the flow of benefits from payor to payee within PES schemes, governments should also play a larger planning role of ensuring nation-wide equity arising from these schemes. In their mapping of carbon-intense forests with poor areas in Laos, Hett et al (2012) found that carbon-intense forests do not always overlap with the poorest areas in Laos, suggesting that REDD+ sites should be at the less carbon-intense but economically poorer forests of Laos if REDD+ were to have pro-poor outcomes. Alternatively, the government could manage its budgets to redistribute the REDD+ benefits where needed. As such, although REDD+ may exhibit a neoliberal nature on international fora, its actual implementation within a country might not directly benefit local forest-dependent communities, which may be a secondary concern to the country’s government so long as the its REDD+ targets of reducing deforestation and forest degradation is met. Hence, in discussing the relevance of PES to CBF, a major factor would be the geographical scale of the PES targets, which would in turn affect the extent to which local communities are perceived as direct stakeholders of the PES scheme.

 

The long-term modality of REDD+, however, could move beyond government-to-government payments to include mechanisms of direct payments to REDD+ project sites from polluting companies as part of their carbon offset (REDD-Monitor, 2017). Consequently, local communities may well be directly involved in the PES transactions should their spiritual forests be selected as REDD+ sites. Spiritual forests of local communities have been traditionally protected for their socio-cultural value and are generally ecologically-rich and carbon-dense (Ormsby and Bhagwat, 2010). However, as companies tend to operate within the legal frameworks of the countries they operate in, such a situation would be rare in places like Vietnam where spiritual forests are not accorded the legal status of special-use, conservation forests (Dam and Barber, 2015). On the other hand, although spiritual/special-use forests are legally-recognised in Bhutan, the few PES schemes that have been implemented are only for watershed services (email interview, 2017a). This begs the question of whether there is indeed a need to apply PES for such forests: if the socio-cultural values behind the protection of these forests are sustained, and if the premise of PES is to peg payments to alternative uses of the forest but there is none imminent, then PES might not even be relevant.

 

Fervent economists could argue, however, that it is only a matter of the human intellect to estimate environmental services based on their intrinsic values instead of using alternatives as proxies. If so, PES could be applied to spiritual forests, as a correct reflection of their environmental value. While conceivable, applying this approach neglects the Humean view of human nature: the monetary benefits derived from the application of PES to a spiritual/special-use forest may, over time, diminish the importance of the socio-cultural values and denigrate the traditional institutions which have served to protect these forests. Dam and Barber (2015) have shown instances in Vietnam when payments from governments for forest protection cease due to a lack of budget, villagers no longer recall the socio-cultural importance of protecting their forests. Likewise, payments for PES schemes are not guaranteed to be infinite. Hence, while PES may be an additional benefit for the local community, it needs to be implemented with care and respect for existing traditional institutions.

 

• Combining PES with certification and legality initiatives?

Certification and legality initiatives focus on the governance of forest-related products and hence seem more relevant to types of CBF with stronger tenure. On the other hand, PES focusses on the governance of environmental services from forestland, and seem to be more common in types of CBF with larger government involvement, such as participatory conservation or joint forest management. As such, these instruments seem to be applied almost exclusively. However, forest products originate from forestland, and as such it is not impossible for these two instruments to be combined. In the example of the family-run slow-growing woodlot (McDermott, 2015), its wood products could still meet mainstream forest certification criteria, whereas PES schemes could be activated to pay for its environmental services. In this manner, PES could incentivise communities to manage their forests over and above the minimum requirements stipulated in forest certification schemes or in legality initiatives. However, from a policy standpoint, unless there is an excess of PES funding, PES payments should be better put to use in forests that are do not generate revenue. Hence, while it is not impossible to combine these two instruments, the likelihood of this happening is low.

 

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I have examined two types of contemporary forest policy initiatives –  certification and legality initiatives, and PES – and have discussed their relevance to CBF. Certification and legality initiatives govern forest-related products, whereas PES governs environmental services from forestland. Drawing on insights from email interviews about forestry in Vietnam, Bhutan, Japan and Indonesia, as well as literature, the former instrument seems more prevalent where community forest rights are strong. PES, on the other hand, seem to be applied where government influence in CBF is strong. Both are products of a neoliberal paradigm and have their respective shortcomings.

 

Nonetheless, if the relevance of contemporary forest policy initiatives to CBF is determined by whether they help to further CBF’s agenda of sustainable forest management and livelihood improvement, then the instrument of certification and legality initiatives seem to be more relevant to CBF. Notwithstanding operational difficulties, it is conceptually more aligned with the reality that forest-dependent communities depend on forest products for livelihoods. It poses the question of, if CBF is to engage with markets, whether community forests can be managed in an even more sustainable manner. On the contrary, PES begins with premise that forests provide environmental services, and the query into its relevance to CBF asks whether local communities can also be beneficiaries. In a way, the origins of PES do not seem to acknowledge that local communities depend on forests for their livelihoods. While it can be retrospectively argued that local communities also benefit from the environmental services of forests they help protect, the monetisation of these services is ontologically jarring with local traditional institutions of forest protection (Gabay and Alam, 2017).

 

Linking these two global forest policy instruments to CBF will be undeniably operationally complex. The cases discussed in this paper show that it is rare for all the requisite conditions for CBF’s success – secure tenure, an enabling regulatory framework, strong governance, viable technology, adequate market knowledge and a supportive bureaucracy (FAO, 2016a) – to be met. However, it seems inevitable that these instruments would affect CBF in a globalised yet carbon-constrained world. Therefore, the support of benevolent government bodies, NGOs and even the corporate responsibly arms of private companies is needed to ensure that these instruments are applied in a relevant and sustainable manner that produces CBF’s dual outcomes of sustainable forest management and livelihood improvement.

 

References

1. Bhagwat, S.A., and Humphreys, D., 2017. Forest Governance in the Anthropocene: Challenges for theory and practice. Forest Policy and Economics, 79:1-7.
2. Boutthavong, S., Hyakumura, K. and Ehara, M., 2017. Stakeholder Participation in REDD+ Readiness Activities for Three Collaborative Projects in Lao PDR. Forests, 8:150.
3. Dam, T.T. and Barber, K. (eds), 2015. Spirit Forestland, Customary Law and Indigenous Ethnic Minority Communities in Vietnam. Knowledge Publishing House, Hanoi.
4. Email interview, 2017a. Views on contemporary forest initiatives and community forestry – Bhutan. 11 October 2017.
5. Email interview, 2017b. Views on contemporary forest initiatives and community forestry – Japan and Indonesia. 20 October 2017.
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[1] The FAO (2016) estimates that, in 62 countries assessed, 732 million hectares of forests are managed via community-based forestry regimes. In total, global forest cover is about 3,999 million hectares (FAO, 2015).