Changing Governance of the World’s Forests

Abstract

Major features of contemporary forest governance include decentralization of forest management, logging concessions in publicly owned commercially valuable forests, and timber certification, primarily in temperate forests. Although a majority of forests continue to be owned formally by governments, the effectiveness of forest governance is increasingly independent of formal ownership. Growing and competing demands for food, biofuels, timber, and environmental services will pose severe challenges to effective forest governance in the future, especially in conjunction with the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. A greater role for community and market actors in forest governance and deeper attention to the factors that lead to effective governance, beyond ownership patterns, is necessary to address future forest governance challenges. Central governments own by far the greater proportion – approximately 86 percent – of the 5.4 billion hectares of the world’s forests and wooded areas. Private and “other ” (mostly communal) forms of ownership constitute just over 10 percent and below 4 percent of global forests, respectively (1). There are important regional variations around these averages (Fig.1, based on (1)). Official statistics on forest ownership, however, misrepresent the extent of and changes in forest cover (2). They also misrepresent the nature and changing forms of global forest governance