We Can’t See the Forest for the Trees: The Environmental Impact of Global Forest Certification Is Unknown

The role of private instruments such as certification systems in global environmental governance is continuously expanding. Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to know the environmental impact of these schemes. However, the sustainability impact of forest certification standards is largely unknown. Although much academic and policy-oriented research has been done, most analyses are desk studies – a paper reality has been created. Therefore we propose a global multi-disciplinary assessment to evaluate the environmental, social and economic impacts of sustainability certification

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

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 Cashore’s 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 Cashore’s (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

Embracing complexity in international forest governance: a way forward; Policy Brief

This Policy Brief summarizes the findings of a comprehensive assessment of scientific information about international forest governance carried out by an Expert Panel of over 30 of the world's leading scientists working in the areas of environmental governance and international forest law. It aims to provide policy and decision makers with essential knowledge and building blocks required for a more effective and inclusive governance of the world's forest

Governing conservation tourism partnerships in Kenya

This article adopts the Policy Arrangements Approach to study how the stability of conservation tourism partnerships is governed. Our study compares two private-community partnerships in Kenya to explore how incongruences resulting from internal dynamics and external challenges are faced. Drawing on the notion of metagovernance, the article examines the roles of the actors involved in ensuring internal and external congruence. It is concluded that conservation tourism PCPs are adaptive entities that need to be actively governed, to ensure long term outcomes that are effective and democratic, and that both state and non-state actors can take on this role

Enabling Transformative Biodiversity Governance in the post-2020 Era

While there are increasing calls for transformative change and transformative governance, what this means in the context of addressing biodiversity loss remains debated. The aim of this edited volume Transforming Biodiversity Governance is to open up this debate and identify ways forward in the context of the implementation of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To become transformative, biodiversity governance needs to be transformed: yet how and by whom? These questions are urgent, given the fact that around one million species are threatened with extinction (Díaz et al., 2019), despite over half a century of global efforts to avoid this tragedy