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ArticleLand tenure governance approaches that tackle policy incoherence, secure rights, improve livelihoods, and maintain forests: Replicable and scalable lessons from a grassroot experience in Honduras
XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.Insecure forest tenure can hamper even the most exemplary community forestry management initiatives. This paper describes and reflects on the case study of the Villa Santa Agroforestry Cooperative, a community organization located in eastern Honduras. Due to policy incoherence, the public forest area concessioned to them since the 1970's was later subjected to land privatization-individual titling schemes based on Agrarian Reform policies. This disrupted and fragmented the former collective tenure regime under which the Cooperative had well managed the forest. In 2012, the concession was almost revoked due to this situation threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of families that depended on it. Despite the challenging context, the institutional leadership and commitment shown by a renewed forest administration and the Cooperative reverted this decision. In 2013, both entities initiated an ample Forest-Land Regularization Process that included the cadaster of all public and private plots and their right holders. Wide open consultations were held with stakeholders, including private land-owners who negotiated mechanisms to work with the Cooperative. As a result, a Public-Private Forest Management Plan was approved; an innovative scheme that remains to this day the only of its kind in Honduras. These processes enabled the Cooperative to attract investments from government, private sector and donors, including agroforestry schemes to restore degraded areas and diversify incomes. Also, transactional costs of traditional activities like pine resination have lowered, and thus continue to sustain communities' livelihoods in the midst of the COVID19 crisis. Further research is still needed to evaluate the scale of the impact and sustainability of the initiatives, but the initial outcomes show the need to escalate its lessons and good practices to a renewed nation-wide community forestry policy that can better contribute to the SDG's livelihood and conservation objectives. Keywords: Forest tenure; Secure land rights; Collective land rights; Community-based forestry; Honduras ID: 3485859 -
ArticleUnraveling the roots of mangrove governance: Sustainable management and evolving policies in Panama
XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.Mangrove forests fulfill essential socio-ecological roles, such as providing timber and other forest products, protecting coasts against erosion and rising sea levels, supporting healthy fisheries, and fostering biodiversity. Within Latin America, Panama has experienced the highest rates of mangrove deforestation since 1980, despite the inclusion of a large extent of their mangrove forests in the National System of Protected Areas. Reasons reported for mangrove loss include noncompliance with regulations, limited multi-actor coordination, and growing trends of coastal development for industrial and commercial purposes. In response to these types of pressures, sustainable mangrove management (SMM) has emerged as an international policy objective (see the Bali Call to Action, 2017), aiming to address mangrove degradation and empower all relevant stakeholders to participate in governance processes. In this study we aim to advance international SMM policy dialogues, by learning from the challenges and opportunities associated with mangrove management in Panama. Findings suggest that SMM could benefit from a greater focus on strategies to enhance communication, collaboration, and trusting relationships between diverse stakeholders, as well as from a more cohesive vision for the sectoral uses of coastlines. Building on these findings, an analysis of Panama’s mangrove-specific policies is combined with insights drawn from key informant interviews with national-level mangrove policy actors to better understand the structural gaps and policy challenges. From the overlapping jurisdictions to competing management perspectives (conservation versus development), mangrove policies were found to be contradictory and fragmented. Potential strategies to overcome these challenges are discussed, and future research needs identified. Keywords: Collaborative governance; forest foods; wetland policy; Central America; tropical deforestation. ID: 3614496 -
ArticleDoes independent forest monitoring reduce forest infringement? Insights from Ghana’s collaborative mobile-based IFM system
XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.Independent Forest Monitoring (IFM) has been a feature of international effort to improve forest governance since its beginning in Cambodia in 1999. Today, IFM has gained traction and is an integral element of emerging forest governance schemes such as voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) which seeks to promote trade in legal timber between EU member countries and timber-producing countries in the global south. Within the VPA, IFM aims to complement the national due diligence mechanisms by flagging illegalities and providing opportunities for redress. Ghana is one such country where IFM is emerging within the country's VPA to address perennial forest governance challenges including corruption. This is often done through projects that develop and train communities on forest laws and provide them with mobile phones and appropriate software applications to monitor and flagged illegalities within their localities. Although this has been done over the years little insights are available on how this IFM architecture has performed. Such analysis is required to understand if IFM presents any hope for sanitizing the forest sector. On the back of this, this paper review community IFM monitoring reports identify key trends on forest illegalities and how they were addressed or otherwise. We found that the real-time monitoring platform has generated 747 alerts as of December 2019. Nearly 72% of them have been verified with most Social Responsibility Agreement (SRA) related infractions resulting in some 32 communities receiving SRA for the first time or on a continuous basis. The study concludes that communities are now protecting their forest as a result of compliance from timber companies which has generated revenue in the form of social responsibility agreements for community projects. Managers of the forest reserves are now responsive to queries as a result of the digital nature of the alerts. Keywords: Monitoring and data collection, Deforestation and forest degradation, Sustainable forest management, Governance ID: 3470164
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