0484-C3
Jeffrey Sayer 1, Christopher Elliot 1, Stewart Maginnis 2
Intergovernmental processes and powerful natural resource management and conservation organisations are promoting simplistic visions of forest problems. They are encouraging the widespread application of normative, "cookie-cutter" forest solutions in which all forests are allocated to a limited number of predefined categories. An alternative paradigm calls for forests to be managed to optimise their public goods values with unique local conditions. Local stakeholders should be important drivers of this process. Under this paradigm managed would be dependent not only on the biophysical conditions of the management unit but on the need to contribute to overall landscape functionality. This would often require a mosaic of different forest management approaches distributed in a way that meets both global conservation needs and the needs of those that live and work in the area. Local communities should be able to negotiate with more distant stakeholders to provide public goods such as biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Locally adapted management approaches may be aggregated into broad categories for the purposes of assessment and monitoring but should not be constrained by the need to correspond to such norms. More emphasis needs to be given to the need to develop locally appropriate solutions for forests as components of multi-functional landscapes. An appropriate balance must sought between protection, management and, where appropriate, restoration to enhance the flow of the full range of forest benefits, primarily for local needs.
The past decade has seen an unprecedented effort to solve forest problems at the global level. Forests have been prominent on the agendas of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. We have seen a succession of intergovernmental forest meetings under the aegis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, the Intergovernmental Forum and most recently the United Nations Forum on Forests. But how much impact has all this international activity had on the ground? To the extent that we make any attempt to measure success we use global statistics. The media and environmental activists track the findings of FAO's Forest Resource Assessment or statistics on different categories of protected areas, areas under certified management etc. This leads to futile debates about the validity of global statistics (Lomborg 2001). Meanwhile we avoid the issue of finding effective ways of monitoring the flows of goods and services that forests provide. We know little about forestry's impact the extinction of the world's forest species. We have only very imprecise estimates of how much carbon our forests store. We can only speculate about the trends in forest resources available to the 1.3 billion poor people that the World Bank tells us depend on forests. The reality is that we know very little about how we are doing in solving global forest problems.
On the other hand we are beginning to learn a lot about how civil society and local communities are solving their forest problems. Kuchli (1997) has documented a number of situations from California to West Africa and from the Himalayas to the Amazon where people have organised themselves to conserve and manage forests. Fairhead and Leach (1995) have shown how communities in West and East Africa have organised themselves to ensure a sustained supply of locally important forest goods and services. A network of small private nature reserves in Costa Rica provides local employment and makes valuable contributions to conserving biodiversity. Joint Forest Management has improved the livelihoods of millions of people in parts of India.
There are large numbers of local successes in improving the conservation and management of forests. But most of these successes will not show up in the global forest statistics. When success occurs it almost always takes the form of subtle mosaics of different forest uses that are adapted to the local landscape and meet a diversity of needs of local people (Kuchli, 1997). There are countless examples in both the developed and developing worlds where local people have rebelled against large-scale solutions to forest problems. Vast industrial monocultures have been rejected with as much vigour as vast national parks. Forest values are dependent on local needs and contexts and every forest system should ideally be managed to optimise its contribution to local livelihoods. If local stakeholders are penalised in order to protect global forest values or to provide for the needs of forest industries then they should be compensated.
The global values of forests are at present at the centre of attention. International conservation groups, heads of forest services, forest specialists in development assistance agencies and the media have all responded to the 1970s alarm at the disappearance of "the world's" rainforests. We contend that excessive emphasis on global values and a failure to provide for local values is the reason for the failure of many investments in forest conservation. Attempts to apply globally conceived "cookie-cutter" solutions to local forest problems may have been counter- productive. We are concerned that too much effort is going into the negotiation of global norms and not enough into the processes that will allow complex solutions to local forest situations to emerge.
Foresters have always allocated forests to categories. We speak of "production forests", "protection forests", "forest reserves" and "national parks" and various other categories of protected areas. National and global forest assessments tell us how much land is allocated to these categories. We know that 10% of the world's forests are in protected areas, that 30,852,896 has have been certified under the Forest Stewardship Council rules. The media and the public attach a lot of significance to these statistics. The progress that is being made in addressing the world's forest problems is measured according to the trends that are revealed in statistics produced by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation), the World Conservation Monitoring Centre etc. Many interest groups set targets according to these national and global measures of forest status. Our own organisations seek to promote 50 million has. of new protected areas by 2005, to ensure that 150,000 has. of sustainably managed forests are certified by this date etc (WWF, 2003). Such statistical measures of our success in ensuring the conservation and sustainable use of forests have been very useful in structuring debates and giving us a general idea of our successes and failures. But this normative approach to forests needs to be balanced by a critical examination of the question of what societies' require from their forests, what are the real outcomes desired for forestlands. The fundamental questions of "how much forest do we need", "where should that forest be located" and "what sort of forest should it be" are often not addressed. This paper will argue that answers to these questions are essential if we are to invest efficiently in forest conservation and management. The answers will have to be negotiated amongst the people most immediately concerned and this will usually have to be done at a scale larger than the conventional management unit but smaller than nations and regions - we are calling this intermediate scale the landscape. We will argue further that the tendency to try and maximise the areas allocated to certain types of forest - for instance protected areas - may be hindering our real objective of optimising the area, distribution and type of forest in landscapes. We will not seek to rigidly define a landscape and we do not consider that it needs necessarily to be delimited on maps - we see the term more as a metaphor to convey the idea of connectivity and balance.
It appears self-evident that forest institutions should seek to provide society with forest products and services in the most efficient way. But most forest institutions are mandated to deal with specific components of the forest landscape. Thus we have separate institutions dealing with protected areas, production forests, watershed forests and forests on farms or in cities. And the reality is that we are not good at managing these diverse components of the forest estate complementarily. Worse, because these institutions inevitably tend to try and maximise the output of their own component of the system they often compete with other institutions dealing with forests or are insensitive to the opportunity costs that they impose upon other users of the land. The most striking example of this are the vigorous campaigns mounted by some conservation organisations to expand protected areas in poor countries with large populations of land-hungry people. One international conservation group recently called for 40% of Madagascar to be allocated to totally protected areas. One wonders how the poor people who are struggling to survive at the forest margin receive such proposals.
There have always been two competing paradigms for forests. The first is a paradigm of segregation between production and protection functions. This is the approach of economic orthodoxy where areas of pristine forests are set aside for nature conservation and forest products are produced intensively in areas allocated for this purpose.
The second is a paradigm of integration, an approach where near-natural forests are managed carefully to yield both timber and other products and, at the same time to maximise biological diversity and other environmental values. This is the approach that has been the traditional basis of forestry in continental Europe.
The divergence of these two paradigms is reflected in constant arguments over the definitions of protected areas. The term "national park" is widely used in Europe to describe multi-functional or "cultural" landscapes. This use is at variance with the definitions used in the United Nations List of National Parks and Protected Areas, which defines parks as areas allocated exclusively for conservation.
Conservationists promote extensive pristine national parks. Those who are focussed on poverty in developing countries prefer integrated approaches. We argue that neither of these doctrines is entirely satisfactory. The problem with the integrated model is that it runs counter to economic orthodoxy. In attempting to manage for everything we fail to maximise returns on any single product. The problem with the segregated model is that it is excessively dependent on market forces. The public goods benefits for which markets are imperfect - amenity, carbon sequestration etc - do not attract the investments that they require.
An alternative approach is to cease to focus on integration or segregation at the management unit level and shift our attention to optimising outcomes through landscape mosaics. Under this third paradigm we recognise that some areas of special significance for biological diversity must be given total protection as inviolate nature reserves. A significant proportion of forest products will be produced most efficiently in intensively managed plantations. But to achieve an optimisation of the full range of goods and services that we require from forests we will need two more ingredients. We will need extensive areas of semi-natural forest to provide the matrix or connectivity between protected areas, to sequester carbon and regulate hydrological functions - none of which require that forests be maintained in a totally natural "inviolate" state. And we will need a process to ensure that the different elements of the mosaic are complementary. Examples are habitat corridors that must be continuous between protected areas and must actually provide the ecological conditions needed for species movements (Simberloff et al 1992). Watershed protection forests must be located so as to intercept linear flows of water and soil - thus parallel to the contours. Intensively managed plantations must be located so as to minimise opportunity costs for agriculture. All of these components must combine to provide an environment in which people can enjoy the benefits of employment, recreation and amenity.
The concept of multi-functionality is more than just a fine-tuning of existing approaches to land use planning. If forests are distributed optimally in the landscape and if the different elements of the landscape mosaic complement one another then the total area of forest needed to provide a given yield of forest benefits is less. This has profound implications for conservation planning. For instance most of the plans for conserving forest biodiversity advocate maximising the extent of protected areas. In a multi-functional landscape one would seek to optimise or even minimise the extent of totally protected areas. Such areas would only be needed to provide the additional habitats of those species that would not be adequately protected in the managed, multiple-use forests. A frequent argument is that some species will always require very large tracts of pristine forest, but we would counter this by pointing out that most if not all of these species are large, wide ranging species (tigers, elephants, eagles etc) that are well adapted to modified habitats. The majority of the species that are obligate inhabitants of pristine or "old growth" forest are small and relatively sedentary - many can thrive in islands of natural habitat in a modified forest matrix.
The major attraction of a conservation strategy that does not require maximising protected areas is that it is more likely to find support in poor developing countries where there is a need for more land for agriculture and access to forests for economic gain. Multi-functional landscapes can achieve conservation objectives whilst reducing the opportunity costs that are imposed upon local people. Any area taken out of production in order to protect biological diversity will deprive local people of land and forest products. The history of integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) highlights the dangers of failing to recognise the costs that conservation programmes can impose upon local people (McShane and Wells in press). ICDPs have also taught us that technical assistance alone will rarely cause people to abandon pathways that they perceive to be economically rational in their local context. Attempts to conserve forests in multi-functional landscapes will therefore fail if the full costs and benefits to all of the stakeholders are not subject to negotiations and trade-offs in an open and transparent manner.
Several international conservation organisations are establishing their conservation priorities at the scale of large ecological regions (Dinnerstein et al 2000). This involves an analysis of conservation options in the context of competing land-uses. A range of stakeholders participates in the development of a vision for what an ideal biodiversity programme for the eco-region might be. Thus, instead of focussing exclusively on the individual cells of a matrix - the nature reserves - eco-regional planning aims to design a set of complementary protected areas covering all the major biological features of the region. It seeks to set these in a matrix of other land-uses that favour biodiversity - for instance through the maintenance of habitat corridors. But conservation priorities are set in the context of other land use priorities. The overall objective is to obtain a compromise between what would be ideal for species conservation and what is realistic in terms of local people's needs.
The knowledge that is required to achieve multi-functional landscapes is not the exclusive preserve of technical forestry specialists. Much of the knowledge about any landscape will be in the form of the tacit knowledge of local people and this has to be given as much value as the explicit knowledge from modern sciences, remote sensing etc. Negotiators who arrive with their maps already drawn on the basis of satellite imagery will already have foreclosed many of the options that local people might have sought to promote (Scott 1996). Transparency and a level playing field for all interested parties are essential (Wollenberg et al 2001). Geographic information systems (GIS) will provide valuable tools for making all information spatially explicit and amenable to scientific analysis but they can also be abused if they are used to promote an external scientific vision of a situation.
Spatial models can allow the identification of those areas that would provide the largest incremental benefits for biological diversity from the smallest increase in forest extent. This approach can help addresse one of the fundamental issues of designing conservation area networks - at what point does the marginal increase in the extent of conservation areas, and thus their cost, exceed the marginal increase in the value of biodiversity conserved.
Far too often what passes for negotiation is in reality a process in which powerful governmental institutions (or development assistance agencies) inform local stakeholders of what has been decided. Neutral facilitation is a valuable tool for breaking down the power differentials that so often characterise such negotiations in rural settings. Solutions that are imposed in the face of explicit or even tacit resistance by local stakeholders will rarely be sustainable. The rural development and social forestry literature is rich in analysis of the difficulties of achieving a genuinely egalitarian process of negotiation between all the different stakeholders who have legitimate interests in forests and land-use. Valid processes require much more time, patience and sensitivity to local cultures than most outside experts are prepared to allocate. Neutral facilitation and explicit recognition of the trade-offs between the interests of different stakeholders are important ingredients of success.
There are countless examples of protected areas being too isolated, of poor farmers being forced onto land that would be better suited to watershed protection, of jobs in forestry being lost when forests are protected in situations where conservation objectives did not require total protection. Global planning is not addressing local values (Sheil and Wunder, 2002). Many of our forest landscapes are dysfunctional. Competition between management agencies and the need to allocate all forests to a simple set of international categories are combining to drive us towards a rigid adherence to one or other of the segregated or integrated paradigms. This is happening at a time when globalisation is also pushing hard in the direction of economic rationality and the segregated model (Sayer and Campbell in press).
Forest conservation and management seems to be succeeding best in places where solutions are being sought at the scale of the landscapes with which the most important stakeholders are most familiar. In most cases mosaics of complementary land and forest uses best achieve landscape functionality. This may mean that relatively small areas of forest are allocated to total protection - the old-growth forests - or to intensive plantations. Areas of multiple-use forest that contribute additional products will often complement these. They will provide amenity values and habitat continuity for some forest species. The landscape will be viable to the extent that it yields the greatest benefits, or imposes the fewest costs, on the stakeholders most directly involved in its use on a day to day basis. We conclude that functional forest landscapes are difficult to achieve but that the following are important elements of success:
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1 Worldwide Fund for Nature - International, Avenue du Mont Blanc, 1196 Gland, Switzerland
2 IUCN - The World Conservation Union, Rue Mauverney 28, 1196 Gland, Switzerland
Paper prepared for the World Forestry Congress, Quebec, Canada, September 2003