National Forest Funds (NFFs)

Office of Assistant Director-General (Forestry Department)

National Forest Funds (NFFs)

Towards a solid architecture and good financial governance

Year of publication 2013

Author Office of Assistant Director-General (Forestry Department)

Product type Book (stand-alone)

ISBN 9251078655

Series title Forest Finance: Working Paper

Edition 1

Full item page

Synopsis (short abstract) In recent years, National Forest Funds (NFFs) have regained international attention as potential solutions to improve financial governance and the administration of funds in the forestry sector. NFFs are financing mechanisms solely dedicated to improving the conservation and sustainable use of forest resources. They are usually established in order to pursue forest related activities independent from traditional budgetary allocation restrictions and are typically endowed with funds from national budgets, ODA and dedicated multior bilateral funding streams (e.g. REDD+ funding). If well-managed and administered, NFFs can be effective in meeting a number of challenges in the forest sector including: advancing long-term investment needs; supporting the decentralisation and devolution of forest management; leveraging additional sources of funding; encouraging private sector investments; promoting the production of forest ecosystem services; adapting forestry spending to the seasonality of operations (e.g. planting season); stimulating more effective forest management; and creating increased transparency and accountability. NFFs can vary significantly both in their stated purpose and the way in which they operate. Indeed, an NFF can function either as a transfer fund or catalytic fund, or perform both functions simultaneously. While a transfer fund can be defined as a distribution platform for funding streams from donors to beneficiaries (mainly from public sources), a catalyti c fund provides finance/support to overcome socio-economic obstacles/crises and to prepare future commercial development more and more independently from public sources.

Language English

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