Report details progress on forest governance in Africa and Asia

A pioneering initiative is working to improve forest governance in ten nations by connecting the people who control forest resources with those who depend on them.

The Forest Governance Learning Group (FGLG) has just published its latest update report, which describes activities over the past year, impacts to date, the state of play in participating countries, and the path ahead.

The FGLG is an informal alliance of in-country teams and international partners active in ten countries. It tries to connect those marginalised from forest governance to those controlling it, and to help both do things better. It carries out focused studies, develops tactics and tools, holds learning events, and works to effect change.

Download full report PDF (238KB)

Highlights from the past year include:

• Ten country teams in place and active in Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Indonesia, India and Vietnam.
• A major learning event on making the law work better for social justice in forestry, involving all the country teams and other international players, in which we recorded lessons learned identified new tactics.
• 19 new policy research outputs and tools.
• 15 new press articles and advocacy outputs. International outreach activities including cooperation with 14 international organisations and participation in 12 international forums.
• Increased engagement of decision-makers on key issues, such as through advocacy work to fight alienation of forest reserve areas to agribusiness in Uganda, and high-level debate on destructive logging in Mozambique.
• Impacts such as shaping the Voluntary Partnership Agreement on legal timber between EC and Ghana, developing an influential small forestry enterprise development strategy in South Africa, and re-orienting the debate about charcoal production in Malawi away from ineffective, regressive policing and towards sustainable livelihoods.

In the coming year FGLG will build on the growing recognition that tackling injustice in decision-making about trees and forests is now the primary challenge for sustainability in many places.

We expect to focus in particular on: an international synthesis of key issues on local land tenure and forest resource access; preparing a plan for a film; recording incidents, breakthroughs, setbacks and emerging issues; a second cross-country learning event focused on governance of responsible forest enterprise; international networking; and deepening in-country impact wherever possible.

The website for the FGLG, where news, reports and work plans for the country teams can be found, is: http://www.iied.org/forestry/research/projects/forest.html