Governing Sustainable Forest Management Issues in Polycentric Governance

Abstract

This article provides the overall view of the international regulatory context for good forest governance (GFG) and sustainable forest management (SFM). It starts by giving a brief overview of the international forestry regime, trade agreements, the Rio conventions, and forestry principles. Subsequently, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) tools for forest assessment and the World Bank Forestry Strategy are discussed. Further, timelines for various regional and international Criteria and Indicators (C&I) for SFM and trade in forest products are highlighted. Finally the leading international voluntary programmes for forest certification are described. From this review, it is clear there is a gap in the international forestry regime, there is an urgent need for an international legally binding forest convention which will guide Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) programmes at the local, national, regional and international/global scale. Here, we argue that FLEGT can catalyse these fragmented elements of an international regime as the EU FLEGT action plan provides a framework to catalyse all dedicated and cross-cutting issue instruments in national forest policy.