Appendix IV. CIFOR's Response to the Recommendations of the 1995 Internally Commissioned External Review

Recommendation: The strategic and operational directions outlined in the MTP require careful refinement to remain relevant in the context of changes that have occurred since it was prepared (Section 1, Evolution of CIFOR: A continuing transition, Page 3, para 2).

Response: CIFOR 's operations have. demonstrated that there were conceptual weaknesses in certain aspects of the original Medium Term Plan. Since the ICER report was written a new MTP has been prepared and approved by TAC and the CGIAR which constitutes a significant departure from that envisaged in 1993.

Recommendation: CIFOR must consider carefully the CGIAR's principal mandate of poverty alleviation in light of what this implies for its research (Section 2, Mandate: Unresolved contradictions, Page 4).

Response: It is useful to stress the slight tension that results from the CG system 's very strong present emphasis on poverty alleviation. CIFOR was established in response to a decade of debate amongst the forestry and development community on the need for international strategic research on forests. Poverty alleviation was not a prime issue during this debate. One could argue that CIFOR was not established by the CGIAR but was given a home by the CGIAR after the concept had been developed by the international forestry community. Fortuitously, poverty alleviation if, a central issue in improved forest resource management. Nonetheless most of CIFOR's Forestry NARS partners do not consider poverty alleviation to be a primary or even important focus. Similarly there are major stakeholders amongst the conservation community in richer countries for whom poverty alleviation is not the prime concern. Funding for CIFOR comes from conservation budgets within aid agencies whose prime concern is environmental protection and not poverty alleviation. There is therefore an inevitable mismatch between CIFOR's research agenda and that of the CGIAR. It is useful that the ICER has drawn attention to this.

Comment: CIFOR exhibits an ambiguous level of interest in tropical dry forests which seems at odds with the CGIAR's focus on poverty alleviation (Section 2.1, Poverty Focus: The implications for CIFOR's work, Page 4, BoTtom para).

Response: CIFOR 's Board and management have discussed extensively the need to address the problems of dry forests. A deliberate decision was taken in 1993 that during its first five years it would he necessary to focus on a manageable research agenda. Given the international and political climate it was considered appropriate to focus on humid forests. Rainforests were. at the centre of the international debate, particularly in the context of the UNCED and post-UNCED processes that were driving political and public opinion at that time. In subsequent reviews of this issue CIFOR 's management and the BoT have agreed that, in the future, forests in the subhumid and drier tropics should figure more prominently in our activity portfolio hut that this should not be done at the expense of the existing program in the humid forests. The MTP 1998-2000 provides for a substantial increase in attention to drier forests.

Recommendation: CIFOR must make an exceptionally high priority of finding research methods that will ensure that local people benefit from the research (Page 5, top 2 paras).

Response: CIFOR management agrees that most forestry problems have to be solved at the local level. This raises the difficult issue of the extent to which a centre such as CIFOR has any comparative advantage operating at the local level. The issue, in the opinion of management, is not that CIFOR needs to gel deeply involved in any local situation hut that CIFOR 's products need to be designed so as to he readily adaptable to local situations. Similarly, generalizable methodologies will need to be developed which will enable forest researchers to better address locality-specific issues. Clearly however, CIFOR as an institution has very limited capacity to get involved in any locality-specific research.

Comment: In project selection, the opportunity loss associated with choosing the "wrong" set of program areas is not apt to be large (Section 3, Strategic Issues: Learning how to say No, Page 7, second para).

Response: CIFOR management considers dangerous the implication that there are so many priorities that it does not matter which ones we choose. We believe that making sure we choose the optimal suite of projects to constitute our portfolio is one of the single greatest challenges confronting management. It remains our view that testing the waters by initiating a fairly broad program and subsequently focusing on those areas where experience has shown that we can make progress and readily find partners is rational and correct. The defect of the original MTP was that it took the view that CIFOR could select more or less at random a set of 27 activities from a much larger pool of potential projects and that by solving these problems we would achieve a reasonable impact. The essence of our strategic thinking since then has been that CIFOR's impact will come not through the sum of the individual impacts of a number of independent research projects but rather through the development of a more holistic capacity to address forest issues. Many of the individual components of the original Medium Term Plan could probably have been tackled equally well by other existing research institutions. Experience has shown that it has not in reality been difficult to focus down on to those areas which were proving most productive for CIFOR and as we move into 1996 we have reduced our portfolio to nine more or less inter-related projects.

Recommendation: The Team suggests that CIFOR organize itself around a limited number of program areas, each with a strong problem focus. These program areas might include Protected Areas, Natural Forests managed primarily for sustainable multiple output production, Natural Forests managed primarily for sustainable timber production, and Plantations (Section 3.3, From Strategy to Program Formulation, Page 8).

Response: CIFOR has reviewed its research structure almost continually since its inception. In particular the Board of Trustees and management have been anxious to achieve a structure which would minimise the obstacles to interdisciplinary collaboration. In reaching our final decision we have taken into account the comments made by the ICER team. However, the pathway that we have taken differs from that proposed. It is explained in CIFOR's Strategic Plan and we believe it actually achieves the objectives identified by the ICER more efficiently than the structure that they proposed. We felt that dividing the program up along biophysical lines would have given a rather old-fashioned flavour to the organisation and our analysis also showed that any sort of matrix structure was inefficient for an organisation of our size. We have therefore opted for a series of clusters (projects) under a single Deputy Director General Research aided by a Chief Scientist.

Recommendation: CIFOR needs to be more proactive in providing opportunities for Indonesians who arc not full staff members to participate in its activities (Section 3.5, Host Country Challenges).

Response: Developing better collaboration with Indonesian scientists was seen by management as very high priority, with the proviso that there should be no sacrifice of scientific quality in the pursuit of this goal. Our major effort to date has been the implementation of the joint MOF/CIFOR Research Fellow programme. Our research at a great many field sites in Indonesia also involves a large number of Indonesian colleagues, many of them associated with universities, FORDA, and other research institutes such as BIOTROP. We believe substantial progress has been made in the period since the 1995 ICER.

Recommendation: CIFOR should proceed very carefully in selecting and setting up a research forest as specified in the Host Country Agreement (CIFOR's Experimental Forest, Page 11, BoTtom para).

Response: CIFOR management believes that the issues identified by the ICER have been adequately addressed in our negotiations with the Government of Indonesia.

Recommendation: A major effort must be made to promote and motivate interdisciplinarity (Sections 4. and 4.1, Interdisciplinarity).

Response: The single issue that has absorbed most of CIFOR's management time since our inception has been that of how to achieve optimal interdisciplinarity in our research. The ICER team is correct in giving some attention to this: however, we feel that their comments are to some extent naive. Interdisciplinary collaboration must be driven by the nature of the problem to be solved. Much international, cutting-edge strategic research will emerge from scientists working within a single discipline. In general the need for interdisciplinarity increases as one gets closer to the locality-specific problems with which CIFOR is least concerned. The ICER fails to distinguish between the need for a very broad holistic vision in defining research needs and the need to apply specific research skills and methodologies in their solution. CIFOR management feels that we are progressing satisfactorily in our quest to optimise the interactions between scientists of different disciplines BoTh on our staff and amongst our partners.

Recommendation: There is no formalized, conceptual framework, or simple set of guidelines, documenting the criteria for selecting research partners (Section 4.2, Making Networks Work).

Response: The selection of partners has been debated at some length in the Strategic Plan. Our view differs from that of the ICER to the extent that we do not feel that rigid formulae can help us to optimise our relationships with research partners. We believe that flexibility is essential and that the nature of the partnership should be determined by the nature of the research that is required. We would add that, at present, all of our research is conducted through partnership arrangements. None of CIFOR 's research is conducted exclusively by CIFOR staff scientists. We do believe that CIFOR will have to continue to learn from its experiences from working with partners and should avoid at this stage getting locked into too many formal long-term relationships.

Recommendation: CIFOR should assign a high priority to the development of a project management framework (Section 4.3, Project Management).

Response: The review team was apparently unaware of the development of a management information system and related adaptation of the accounting system to provide an optimal project management tool (BoTh of which had been initialed by the lime of the team 's visit). The comments under section 4.3 are therefore somewhat redundant. CIFOR is making excellent progress in the development of a comprehensive project management system.

Recommendation: Section 5.1, Organisational Structure, provides a number of detailed recommendations on CIFOR's organisational structure.

Response: The analysis by the ICER was very useful in allowing CIFOR's management and Board of Trustees to reach a final decision on our organisational structure. The options that were finally adopted differ from those proposed by the ICER team but nonetheless address the problems and issues that they raised.

Recommendation: CIFOR should create a position of Deputy Director General Research to play a pivotal co-ordinating role for all research activities (Section 5.2, page 20).

Response: CIFOR has now implemented this recommendation.

Comment: CIFOR management needs to adopt a system of formal procedures on hiring and strive for greater transparency on recruitment (Section 5.3, Staffing, Section 5.3.1., Recruitment Transparency).

Response: CIFOR management feel that we have achieved an appropriate balance between open competition and targeted head-hunting for staff recruitment. The scientific competency required for our staff and the very small pool of specialists available with the necessary competence, coupled with the scarcity of resources to process applications in the early days of CIFOR's existence, meant that head-hunting was the most appropriate way of filling some positions. The ICER team should be aware that an international independent panel was appointed to evaluate well over a thousand applications that were received for initial posts advertised by CIFOR and that the majority of the present internationally recruited staff were recruited through that process. The international panel itself urged CIFOR to "head-hunt" for the one or two positions that failed to emerge from the press campaign. Recent recruitment efforts have emphasized competitive applications for BoTh international and professional-level national staff based on widely distributed advertisements.

Recommendation: The current policy of hiring all internationally recruited staff on relatively short-term contracts should be re-evaluated (Section 5.3.2., Career Management, Containing Uncertainties).

Response: However, there was a requirement from the Board of Trustees that a reasonable turnover of staff should be achieved in the early years in order to gradually improve the gender and geographic representation amongst internationally recruited scientists. A majority of internationally recruited staff have now been given longer-term contract extensions.

Recommendations: The review team made a number of comments on CIFOR's emerging culture and the ways it is being shaped by BoTh the environment and by expectations of management (Section 5.4, Organisational Culture).

Response: CIFOR management was surprised by the team's observation that we may he exerting too much pressure on our staff. One of our concerns had been that we might not be exerting enough pressure. Otherwise the comments made by the team under this heading are accepted by management and are in fact addressed in the Strategic Plan.

Recommendation: There is a need to redefine the roles of senior management to address changes that have occurred as CIFOR has grown (Section 5.5, Leadership and Management).

Response: The recommendations of the ICER have been reflected in the subsequent reorganisation and reallocation of responsibilities amongst management.

Observation: The Board of Trustees does not adequately represent CIFOR's stakeholders and clients (Section 5.6.2, Qualifications of the Board of Trustees).

Response: Unfortunately the ICER team seems to have based its report on inaccurate information about the Board of Trustees. The assessments in this section have been reviewed by management and the Board and we believe the arguments of the ICER team are fundamentally wrong. They do not give a correct portrayal of the present composition and qualifications of the Board.

Recommendation: The internal audit function should be redefined so that the internal auditor docs not report to the DG (Section 5.6.3, Internal Audit).

Response: CIFOR has verified that its internal audit structure is consistent with that employed in other CGIAR centers. We are not quite clear what the point is that the ICER is making here, as our procedures do not differ from the corporate formula that they advocate.

Recommendation: Revisions should be considered in the term of office of BOT members, and the frequency of BOT meetings should be increased (Section 5.6.4, Terms, Meetings, Frequency and Orientation).

Response: Much of this section is based on an incorrect perception of the way the BOT operates. We do not think the ICER has made a case for changing the present term of office of Board members. We do think that the present procedures for briefing Board members are adequate. We do not believe that it is feasible or cost effective for the Board to meet four times a year as advocated by the ICER, even if some of these meetings were to be held by videoconferencing.

Recommendation: CIFOR should consider developing its newsletter into a substantial, popular journal (Section 6.2, Information Dissemination).

Response: We do not intend to develop a CIFOR journal at present. We feel that we have greater leverage in helping existing journals, especially in developing countries, to improve their standards and coverage of interdisciplinary issues. We do not believe that making our newsletter into a news magazine is appropriate or useful at this stage. If anything, we see that there are too many hard copy newsletters and newspapers circulating in forestry. We prefer to apply our resources to improving the dissemination of research results (preferably electronically) and in other ways helping to increase the impact of existing modes of dissemination.

Recommendation: The strategic and operational directions outlined in the MTP require careful refinement to remain relevant in the context of changes that have occurred since it was prepared (Section 1, Evolution of CIFOR: A continuing transition, Page 3, para 2).	*Response:* CIFOR 's operations have. demonstrated that there were conceptual weaknesses in certain aspects of the original Medium Term Plan. Since the ICER report was written a new MTP has been prepared and approved by TAC and the CGIAR which constitutes a significant departure from that envisaged in 1993.
Recommendation: CIFOR must consider carefully the CGIAR's principal mandate of poverty alleviation in light of what this implies for its research (Section 2, Mandate: Unresolved contradictions, Page 4).	*Response:* It is useful to stress the slight tension that results from the CG system 's very strong present emphasis on poverty alleviation. CIFOR was established in response to a decade of debate amongst the forestry and development community on the need for international strategic research on forests. Poverty alleviation was not a prime issue during this debate. One could argue that CIFOR was not established by the CGIAR but was given a home by the CGIAR after the concept had been developed by the international forestry community. Fortuitously, poverty alleviation if, a central issue in improved forest resource management. Nonetheless most of CIFOR's Forestry NARS partners do not consider poverty alleviation to be a primary or even important focus. Similarly there are major stakeholders amongst the conservation community in richer countries for whom poverty alleviation is not the prime concern. Funding for CIFOR comes from conservation budgets within aid agencies whose prime concern is environmental protection and not poverty alleviation. There is therefore an inevitable mismatch between CIFOR's research agenda and that of the CGIAR. It is useful that the ICER has drawn attention to this.
Comment: CIFOR exhibits an ambiguous level of interest in tropical dry forests which seems at odds with the CGIAR's focus on poverty alleviation (Section 2.1, Poverty Focus: The implications for CIFOR's work, Page 4, BoTtom para).	*Response:* CIFOR 's Board and management have discussed extensively the need to address the problems of dry forests. A deliberate decision was taken in 1993 that during its first five years it would he necessary to focus on a manageable research agenda. Given the international and political climate it was considered appropriate to focus on humid forests. Rainforests were. at the centre of the international debate, particularly in the context of the UNCED and post-UNCED processes that were driving political and public opinion at that time. In subsequent reviews of this issue CIFOR 's management and the BoT have agreed that, in the future, forests in the subhumid and drier tropics should figure more prominently in our activity portfolio hut that this should not be done at the expense of the existing program in the humid forests. The MTP 1998-2000 provides for a substantial increase in attention to drier forests.
Recommendation: CIFOR must make an exceptionally high priority of finding research methods that will ensure that local people benefit from the research (Page 5, top 2 paras).	*Response:* CIFOR management agrees that most forestry problems have to be solved at the local level. This raises the difficult issue of the extent to which a centre such as CIFOR has any comparative advantage operating at the local level. The issue, in the opinion of management, is not that CIFOR needs to gel deeply involved in any local situation hut that CIFOR 's products need to be designed so as to he readily adaptable to local situations. Similarly, generalizable methodologies will need to be developed which will enable forest researchers to better address locality-specific issues. Clearly however, CIFOR as an institution has very limited capacity to get involved in any locality-specific research.
Comment: In project selection, the opportunity loss associated with choosing the "wrong" set of program areas is not apt to be large (Section 3, Strategic Issues: Learning how to say No, Page 7, second para).	*Response:* CIFOR management considers dangerous the implication that there are so many priorities that it does not matter which ones we choose. We believe that making sure we choose the optimal suite of projects to constitute our portfolio is one of the single greatest challenges confronting management. It remains our view that testing the waters by initiating a fairly broad program and subsequently focusing on those areas where experience has shown that we can make progress and readily find partners is rational and correct. The defect of the original MTP was that it took the view that CIFOR could select more or less at random a set of 27 activities from a much larger pool of potential projects and that by solving these problems we would achieve a reasonable impact. The essence of our strategic thinking since then has been that CIFOR's impact will come not through the sum of the individual impacts of a number of independent research projects but rather through the development of a more holistic capacity to address forest issues. Many of the individual components of the original Medium Term Plan could probably have been tackled equally well by other existing research institutions. Experience has shown that it has not in reality been difficult to focus down on to those areas which were proving most productive for CIFOR and as we move into 1996 we have reduced our portfolio to nine more or less inter-related projects.
Recommendation: The Team suggests that CIFOR organize itself around a limited number of program areas, each with a strong problem focus. These program areas might include Protected Areas, Natural Forests managed primarily for sustainable multiple output production, Natural Forests managed primarily for sustainable timber production, and Plantations (Section 3.3, From Strategy to Program Formulation, Page 8).	*Response:* CIFOR has reviewed its research structure almost continually since its inception. In particular the Board of Trustees and management have been anxious to achieve a structure which would minimise the obstacles to interdisciplinary collaboration. In reaching our final decision we have taken into account the comments made by the ICER team. However, the pathway that we have taken differs from that proposed. It is explained in CIFOR's Strategic Plan and we believe it actually achieves the objectives identified by the ICER more efficiently than the structure that they proposed. We felt that dividing the program up along biophysical lines would have given a rather old-fashioned flavour to the organisation and our analysis also showed that any sort of matrix structure was inefficient for an organisation of our size. We have therefore opted for a series of clusters (projects) under a single Deputy Director General Research aided by a Chief Scientist.
Recommendation: CIFOR needs to be more proactive in providing opportunities for Indonesians who arc not full staff members to participate in its activities (Section 3.5, Host Country Challenges).	*Response:* Developing better collaboration with Indonesian scientists was seen by management as very high priority, with the proviso that there should be no sacrifice of scientific quality in the pursuit of this goal. Our major effort to date has been the implementation of the joint MOF/CIFOR Research Fellow programme. Our research at a great many field sites in Indonesia also involves a large number of Indonesian colleagues, many of them associated with universities, FORDA, and other research institutes such as BIOTROP. We believe substantial progress has been made in the period since the 1995 ICER.
Recommendation: CIFOR should proceed very carefully in selecting and setting up a research forest as specified in the Host Country Agreement (CIFOR's Experimental Forest, Page 11, BoTtom para).	*Response:* CIFOR management believes that the issues identified by the ICER have been adequately addressed in our negotiations with the Government of Indonesia.
Recommendation: A major effort must be made to promote and motivate interdisciplinarity (Sections 4. and 4.1, Interdisciplinarity).	*Response:* The single issue that has absorbed most of CIFOR's management time since our inception has been that of how to achieve optimal interdisciplinarity in our research. The ICER team is correct in giving some attention to this: however, we feel that their comments are to some extent naive. Interdisciplinary collaboration must be driven by the nature of the problem to be solved. Much international, cutting-edge strategic research will emerge from scientists working within a single discipline. In general the need for interdisciplinarity increases as one gets closer to the locality-specific problems with which CIFOR is least concerned. The ICER fails to distinguish between the need for a very broad holistic vision in defining research needs and the need to apply specific research skills and methodologies in their solution. CIFOR management feels that we are progressing satisfactorily in our quest to optimise the interactions between scientists of different disciplines BoTh on our staff and amongst our partners.
Recommendation: There is no formalized, conceptual framework, or simple set of guidelines, documenting the criteria for selecting research partners (Section 4.2, Making Networks Work).	*Response:* The selection of partners has been debated at some length in the Strategic Plan. Our view differs from that of the ICER to the extent that we do not feel that rigid formulae can help us to optimise our relationships with research partners. We believe that flexibility is essential and that the nature of the partnership should be determined by the nature of the research that is required. We would add that, at present, all of our research is conducted through partnership arrangements. None of CIFOR 's research is conducted exclusively by CIFOR staff scientists. We do believe that CIFOR will have to continue to learn from its experiences from working with partners and should avoid at this stage getting locked into too many formal long-term relationships.
Recommendation: CIFOR should assign a high priority to the development of a project management framework (Section 4.3, Project Management).	*Response:* The review team was apparently unaware of the development of a management information system and related adaptation of the accounting system to provide an optimal project management tool (BoTh of which had been initialed by the lime of the team 's visit). The comments under section 4.3 are therefore somewhat redundant. CIFOR is making excellent progress in the development of a comprehensive project management system.
Recommendation: Section 5.1, Organisational Structure, provides a number of detailed recommendations on CIFOR's organisational structure.	*Response:* The analysis by the ICER was very useful in allowing CIFOR's management and Board of Trustees to reach a final decision on our organisational structure. The options that were finally adopted differ from those proposed by the ICER team but nonetheless address the problems and issues that they raised.
Recommendation: CIFOR should create a position of Deputy Director General Research to play a pivotal co-ordinating role for all research activities (Section 5.2, page 20).	*Response:* CIFOR has now implemented this recommendation.
Comment: CIFOR management needs to adopt a system of formal procedures on hiring and strive for greater transparency on recruitment (Section 5.3, Staffing, Section 5.3.1., Recruitment Transparency).	*Response:* CIFOR management feel that we have achieved an appropriate balance between open competition and targeted head-hunting for staff recruitment. The scientific competency required for our staff and the very small pool of specialists available with the necessary competence, coupled with the scarcity of resources to process applications in the early days of CIFOR's existence, meant that head-hunting was the most appropriate way of filling some positions. The ICER team should be aware that an international independent panel was appointed to evaluate well over a thousand applications that were received for initial posts advertised by CIFOR and that the majority of the present internationally recruited staff were recruited through that process. The international panel itself urged CIFOR to "head-hunt" for the one or two positions that failed to emerge from the press campaign. Recent recruitment efforts have emphasized competitive applications for BoTh international and professional-level national staff based on widely distributed advertisements.
Recommendation: The current policy of hiring all internationally recruited staff on relatively short-term contracts should be re-evaluated (Section 5.3.2., Career Management, Containing Uncertainties).	*Response:* However, there was a requirement from the Board of Trustees that a reasonable turnover of staff should be achieved in the early years in order to gradually improve the gender and geographic representation amongst internationally recruited scientists. A majority of internationally recruited staff have now been given longer-term contract extensions.
Recommendations: The review team made a number of comments on CIFOR's emerging culture and the ways it is being shaped by BoTh the environment and by expectations of management (Section 5.4, Organisational Culture).	*Response:* CIFOR management was surprised by the team's observation that we may he exerting too much pressure on our staff. One of our concerns had been that we might not be exerting enough pressure. Otherwise the comments made by the team under this heading are accepted by management and are in fact addressed in the Strategic Plan.
Recommendation: There is a need to redefine the roles of senior management to address changes that have occurred as CIFOR has grown (Section 5.5, Leadership and Management).	*Response:* The recommendations of the ICER have been reflected in the subsequent reorganisation and reallocation of responsibilities amongst management.
Observation: The Board of Trustees does not adequately represent CIFOR's stakeholders and clients (Section 5.6.2, Qualifications of the Board of Trustees).	*Response:* Unfortunately the ICER team seems to have based its report on inaccurate information about the Board of Trustees. The assessments in this section have been reviewed by management and the Board and we believe the arguments of the ICER team are fundamentally wrong. They do not give a correct portrayal of the present composition and qualifications of the Board.
Recommendation: The internal audit function should be redefined so that the internal auditor docs not report to the DG (Section 5.6.3, Internal Audit).	*Response:* CIFOR has verified that its internal audit structure is consistent with that employed in other CGIAR centers. We are not quite clear what the point is that the ICER is making here, as our procedures do not differ from the corporate formula that they advocate.
Recommendation: Revisions should be considered in the term of office of BOT members, and the frequency of BOT meetings should be increased (Section 5.6.4, Terms, Meetings, Frequency and Orientation).	*Response:* Much of this section is based on an incorrect perception of the way the BOT operates. We do not think the ICER has made a case for changing the present term of office of Board members. We do think that the present procedures for briefing Board members are adequate. We do not believe that it is feasible or cost effective for the Board to meet four times a year as advocated by the ICER, even if some of these meetings were to be held by videoconferencing.
Recommendation: CIFOR should consider developing its newsletter into a substantial, popular journal (Section 6.2, Information Dissemination).	*Response:* We do not intend to develop a CIFOR journal at present. We feel that we have greater leverage in helping existing journals, especially in developing countries, to improve their standards and coverage of interdisciplinary issues. We do not believe that making our newsletter into a news magazine is appropriate or useful at this stage. If anything, we see that there are too many hard copy newsletters and newspapers circulating in forestry. We prefer to apply our resources to improving the dissemination of research results (preferably electronically) and in other ways helping to increase the impact of existing modes of dissemination.