Forest Governance Learning Group - Malawi, Improving Forest Governance - Improving Rural Livelihoods

Malawi established an FGLG sub-group in February 2004 with support from IIED. The group is comprised of forest practitioners that focus on exchanging lessons and developing ideas for improving forest governance in the country.
This document sets out a work plan for the subgroup. FGLG-Malawi will contribute to the realization of the national goal of conservation and sustainable management of forest goods and services for improved and equitable livelihoods. Specifically, it has the following objectives:
• To identify, speed-up, and spread learning about workable approaches to good forest governance
• To make measurable progress in improving sustainable local returns to livelihoods from law
enforcement, private sector responsibility and enhanced local ownership and access rights; and
• To build long-term capacity to spread these improvements.
A three year plan is proposed that will provide the following outputs:
• Output 1: Poverty reduction strategy, national forest programme and decentralisation programme enable improved forest governance
• Output 2: Illegal and corrupt forestry practices that degrade livelihoods are reduced through the adoption and spread of practical approaches to improve forest governance
• Output 3: Forest enterprise initiatives and private sector associations comply with the law and spread practical approaches to improve forest governance
• Output 4: Ownership, access rights, policy and management frameworks are improved to support local control and benefit sharing.