1.1 Inter-Sectoral and Macroeconomic Aspects
1.2 Enterprise Aspects
1.3 Environmental Aspects
1.4 Social and Community Aspects
1.5 Sustainability Aspects
The term "sustainable development" asks planning teams to consider and integrate the social, environmental, and economic consequences of their choices. The explicit mention of "sustainable development" is recent. Yet it would be surprising if forestry agencies - now or in the past - ever subscribed to unsustainable forest protection and management.
What is new, however, is a more comprehensive evaluation of the planning options. Most traditional forestry agencies have focused heavily on commodity production. Critics claim there is too much emphasis of industrial timber in relation to other forest goods, services, and values. Thus the planning has to accommodate a wider exploration of "Trees and forests for whom and for what?" To do this, you need to formulate a planning agenda that covers the following broad themes:
1. Macroeconomic and inter-sectoral aspects. - Your planning should be consistent with fiscal and monetary policies, inflows of development aid, and other macroeconomic aspects. Just as importantly, forests are affected by policies and actions in agriculture, energy, transportation, industrial development, trade, tourism, human settlements, and so on.2. Enterprise aspects. - On its own, your agency does not have the capacity to protect and manage forests. Rather, you should work cooperatively through and with a variety of large and small enterprises. These enterprises succeed to the extent you provide them with a favorable policy and regulatory setting.
3. Environmental aspects. - Your planning should produce strategies to elevate environmental issues in forest protection and management. What additional information do you need to know about environmental aspects, and how will you obtain it? What field practices lead to sound environmental decisions? What policy framework will move you towards higher levels of forest protection?
4. Social and community aspects. - A prominent part of your planning should examine traditional use rights for forest resources, together with community systems to protect and manage them. A closely related theme concerns policies and actions to better serve indigenous and peasant groups.
5. The sustainability aspects. - Your planning should be concerned with the sustainability of development and therefore you should pay attention to a number of weaknesses in project design and practice. Continuity of activities after the project has ended, diffusion of benefits beyond the project area, irreversibility of some actions or externalities are all examples of important aspects to consider in your planning to ensure the sustainability of development.
Early in the planning, it can be helpful to construct a table of goods, services, and values from the forests (Box 5). You should make a special effort to itemize subsistence forest uses, as well as ecological and environmental services. This table will stimulate many questions about the levels and combinations of what the forest provides. In this way, your planning team will be able to set its direction and define its scope.
|
Box 5. Table of Forest Goods, Services, and Values to Help Define the Direction and Scope of Your Planning. | |
|
Category |
What Are Your Sources of Information? |
|
· Tree and forest products in the "formal" (recorded) economy |
Describe and quantify with industrial profiles; producer surveys; supply/demand studies; trade statistics. |
|
· Forest materials for housing (structures and roofs) in the "informal" (unrecorded) economy |
Describe and quantify with focus groups; rapid rural appraisals; other field-based techniques. |
|
· Food and medicine from trees and forests in the "informal" economy |
Describe and quantify with focus groups; rapid rural appraisals; other field-based techniques. |
|
· Firewood and charcoal from trees and forests in the "informal" economy |
Describe and quantify with focus groups; rapid rural appraisals; other field-based techniques. |
|
· "Way of life" of communities living in or near forests |
Describe with help of ethnographic studies; anthropological research. |
|
· Trees and forests in support of agriculture |
Describe and quantify agroforestry benefits; apply valuation methods (e.g., for increased production, costs avoided, and others) from resource economics. |
|
· Trees and forests in support of soil and water conservation |
Describe protective functions; quantify water flows for different purposes and users; apply valuation methods (e.g., damages avoided, increased production, and others) from resource economics. |
|
· Trees and forests in support of tourism, scenic amenities, and recreation |
Describe and quantify visitor-days (i.e., in forest-based tourism); apply valuation methods (e.g., travel costs) from resource economics. |
|
· Trees and forests in support of biodiversity conservation, wildlife habitat, and ecosystem maintenance |
Describe issues and goals; apply valuation methods (e.g., contingent markets, option values) when possible. |
|
· Trees and forests in support of carbon storage |
Quantify tons/ha and economic values from published analyses. |
|
Continue with other categories of forest products, services, and values. |
Identify, describe, and quantify to the best of your ability. |
Liter-sectoral and macroeconomic aspects are prominent among issues that should appear on your planning agenda (Worksheet 2). Often you will address these first.
In this publication, we stress that your planning should strive for inter-agency coordination. You want to create opportunities for your forestry agency to collaborate with other agencies in determining appropriate land uses and practices - perhaps through shared efforts to develop and apply land-use plans. What are your ideas to accomplish this? That question should rank high on your planning agenda.
Furthermore, the issues on your agenda should make sense in relation to the macroeconomic situation. For example:
· How will the rate and location of economic growth affect the demand for lands to produce food, roads to transport goods and people, and so on?· What strategic actions will you take (in collaboration with other agencies) to control where these activities occur?
· Which regions are growing fastest and slowest economically, and how should this determine your agency's programs and activities (i.e., regarding mix and location)?
In many countries, the demand for construction (e.g., for houses, offices, and infrastructure) responds to increasing or decreasing credit flows and interest rates. Similarly, exports of forest products may reflect shifts in currency exchange rates, general economic stability, and strategies in international trade. These factors influence the domestic and foreign demand for forest products, and hence your agency's planning for raw material supply and related issues.
Policies on foreign investment can have consequences for production, income, and employment in the forest-based industries. These policies are made at political and administrative levels higher than the forestry agency. But you support and implement them in terms of allocating forest concessions and taking other measures. What are your goals and strategies for foreign participation in forest harvesting, processing, and exporting?
Where public debt is a constraint, your agency will be pressured to increase its revenues and decrease its spending. This constraint often dictates feasible and infeasible strategic choices for your agency. For example, your planning may need to consider how to consolidate offices, reduce operational expenses, and modify or eliminate subsidy programs.
In some countries, inflows of development aid are a significant component of total funding for forest use and conservation. This calls for preparation and planning to effectively utilize the funds that you expect to be forthcoming. Your planning needs to consider how to respond to the changing requirements of aid donors, and how to improve your agency's partnerships with NGOs so that the aid is used as effectively as possible.
Effective forest protection and management depends on joint learning by public and private partners. Your private partners are a wide mix of NGOs, profit-oriented businesses, and landowners (individual and communal). You seek strategies that will motivate private actions to achieve social benefits (Worksheet 3).
The mix of public and private activities is a good starting point for this discussion. For example, government tree nurseries can be unnecessary if farmers and companies are able to produce and distribute seedlings at lower costs. Various governments have tried to establish and operate wood processing plants and to market the products - often at financial and economic losses. In your planning, you should consider how and when to terminate or transfer operations that are costly for your agency. This is a sensitive topic, but one that you cannot avoid from the standpoint of responsible management.
Additionally, your planning team needs to consider improvements in the regulatory setting. Virtually all forestry agencies impose regulations on forest-based enterprises. This is both legitimate and necessary. But when carried too far, regulations lead to excessive command-and-control. The consequence is avoidance, special appeals, corruption, and other social inefficiencies:
· Where regulations are not working, which of them should be reformed or abolished?
· What new strategies do you propose in their place?
Regulatory reform often occurs in a multi-year framework of evaluations and recommendations, such as through ad hoc committees. Your planning team may develop a strategic approach to design this framework and make it operational.
You also may need to review the criteria, procedures, and contract terms for allocating forest concessions (i.e., forest utilization agreements). Your first aim is to avoid conflicts with indigenous land claims and other land users. Additionally, you want forest users to feel secure about their future claims on the forest. Without security, nobody rationally invests in forest protection, regeneration, and management. What improvements do you seek in this area, and what actions do you propose to achieve them? This, too, should be a major focus for strategic planning.
The future supply of trees and forests is a matter of social interest. But many forest goods and services contribute to private profits. In this light, what criteria justify the use of public funds to grow forest products that will be harvested privately? What can your planning team do to help your agency answer that question? Moreover, how can you increase the social payoff from the limited quantity of incentives you provide? These questions are always important, but particularly where countries struggle with fiscal deficits.
A significant but generally unmeasured share of forest harvesting, processing, and consumption is by small enterprises. Many are in the "informal economy," where activity is unrecorded. Key questions for planners are:
· What can you do to increase the social efficiency of small enterprises? In particular, how do you increase their interest and capacity to protect and manage forests?· What are your agency's improvement goals and action strategies in this area?
These issues are challenging where small operations exist outside the law, and where governments have viewed them as threats to the forest. Yet they are inescapable when considering social and community aspects (section 1.4).
Your attention to environmental issues refers to trees and forests in soil conservation, water supply, wildlife habitat, biodiversity protection, and so on (Worksheet 4). With the help of appropriate references, you and your advisory committees should develop such a list for the circumstances of your country. Then with respect to your strategic planning:
· In this planning cycle, what are your goals to increase the amount of understanding about these environmental functions?· What are your proposals to actually use this information in policies and programs?
The more fully you are able to describe the environmental benefits of forests, the stronger will be your agency's position to obtain political and budgetary support. Over the long term, your progress to produce a "green account" may change your agency's priorities, although with possible resistance from some of your traditional interest groups.
Your planning needs to consider how you can reduce the risks of environmental disturbances that occur through logging, road building, plantation establishment, and other activities. You want to be clear about the advantages and limitations of environmental profiles, land-use plans, forest management plans, and environmental impact assessment (EIA) as instruments to avoid or mitigate negative environmental impacts. Most countries can choose from several instruments, some mandatory and others voluntary. Some interventions are helpful at a regional scale; others work better for small areas. Which approaches have you been using, and how (if at all) should this change in the years ahead?
Above all, you want affordable approaches that provide satisfactory results. Many countries try to regulate technologies - such as in forest harvesting and processing - with unfortunate side effects. For example, your agency may prohibit chainsaws to produce sawnwood because the practice is "wasteful" from the standpoint of timber utilization. Moreover, you may require that permits be obtained as before for all tree cutting, even on small farms. But these and similar measures can be socially costly. They can deny economic opportunities to deserving members of a society. Therefore, your planning should define a process to carefully evaluate these tradeoffs:
· If you are considering new approaches to control environmental impacts, what will be your strategy to test and evaluate them?· Where information on cost-effectiveness is lacking, what can you do to fill the gaps?
Finally, your planning team needs to review several policy choices to advance environmental goals. This is a rapidly evolving area for discussion and debate. For example, your planning may explore goals and strategies to:
· certify the sustainability of forest management;· insure that forests are taxed no more than competing land uses;
· extend fiscal and other incentives to the situation of native forests (i.e., not solely for planted trees);
· adjust the level of forest charges to incorporate environmental considerations (i.e., develop and apply "green taxes"); and
· use performance bonds to compensate for environmental damages because of poor practices in forest harvesting and road building.
Many forestry agencies have been slow to initiate these and related approaches. Based on your country's experience to date, what are your plans to pursue these approaches in the future? As always, your planning team should determine how and when you will monitor, evaluate, and correct your actions.
In most countries, forestry agencies are trying to learn how they can better serve disadvantaged populations. Usually this refers to peasant and indigenous people in all their variety. The scope may include small farms, subsistence families living in or near the forests, and the like. To be effective, your planning should emphasize goals and strategies to improve your agency's service to these populations. Important themes are tenure and use rights, organizational and managerial capacity, appropriate technology and incentives, and participation in agency decisions (Worksheet 5).
Your goals to improve tenure and use rights often begin with fact finding, such as through social assessments in communities and households. You are learning where and why use rights are unclear or conflicting. The assessments help you define strategies for mapping and registering claims to forests and lands, and for addressing how to resolve legal and institutional problems. Much of this work has to be coordinated with agencies for agriculture, land colonization, social services, and others. The whole of the inter-agency effort should build upon a foundation of improvement goals, strategies, evaluation, and correction - i.e., it should adhere to a process of good planning.
What can you do to increase the capacity of rural communities to take care of forests, farm trees, and related resources? Often, you begin by looking for actions that will improve how your country recognizes traditional systems of authority in forested areas. Secondly, the planning should address how to improve your allocation of forest use rights (concessions, licenses, contracts, etc.) so that they fit the financial, technical, and managerial capacities of indigenous and peasant people. Both of these measures are acts of empowerment.
But empowerment also requires technologies and incentives. In your strategic planning, you want to discuss and debate how you should adjust your policies, programs, projects to encourage small and labor-using methods:
· In which activities of silviculture, forest harvesting, processing, reforestation, etc., are small-scale methods economically and socially efficient? Conversely, where are they inefficient? If you do not know, what is your plan to find out?· In light of your responses to the preceding questions, how should you adapt your agency's extension efforts to reach peasant and indigenous people?
· Should you promote joint ventures between the communities and private or public partners in certain aspects of forest protection and management?
Finally, your planning should consider how to improve grass-roots participation in your agency's decisionmaking. What actions will improve the consultative and decision role of peasant and indigenous groups on a continuing basis? How will you be organized for this? Possibly your planning team should consider strategies to favor certain disadvantaged groups in agency employment, training, and incentives.
The growing concern with the sustainability of development has drawn attention to a number of weaknesses in planning for forests, in particular at the project level. Some of these reflect too narrow a definition of the boundaries of the activity in question; others, inadequacies in the mechanisms for project planning; and others, insufficient understanding of the constraints and possibilities of the institutional framework within which projects have to function. A number of operational implications for forestry planning are (derived from Winpenny 1991):
· avoid damage to critical natural capital, and be wary of starting processes that are irreversible;· where the resource can be maintained, limit exploitation to sustainable levels; where it is to be run down (e.g., to release land for agriculture), set aside and invest enough of the proceeds to produce a permanent income stream or alternative sources of supply of forest products for those who depend upon the forest;
· where possible, put economic values on social and environmental costs and benefits, so that they are taken into account in decisions; and
· ensure to the fullest extent possible that impacts normally treated as externalities are internalized within the design of a project-e.g., by including compensatory measures where necessary, such as planting trees to maintain forest outputs lost.
