C. Barthod
This article broadly outlines the procedures adopted by the Helsinki and Montreal Processes, as they concern sustainable forest management. The importance of cultural factors in identifying criteria and indicators for sustainable management is highlighted, together with related problems that have been identified but not yet fully solved.
Christian Barthod is Deputy Director of Forestry at the French Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 19 avenue du Maine, 75015 Pans, France.
Note: This article is an adaptation of a voluntary paper submitted to the Eleventh World Forestry Congress. 1322 October 1997. Antalya, Turkey.
The issue of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management was brought into the political debate during preparations for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, when the Canadian delegation presented a proposal for guidelines on international cooperation and negotiations for development projects. The only trace left of this proposal in the Declaration of Forest Principles was a reference to "governing principles taking account of the relevant methodologies and criteria that have been internationally agreed, when they are judicious and applicable". This minimal agreement did, however, pave the way for some major achievements: the Helsinki, Montreal and Tarapoto Processes and the mandate of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, not to mention the pioneering work of the International Tropical Timber Organization and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
The concept of criteria and indicators for sustainable management has various aspects - with consequent ambiguities and this in part explains the amount of attention it receives. Four major issues are involved and they can be analysed separately.
1) At the national or provincial level where forestry policy is developed and actually implemented, criteria and indicators are tools for assessing the relevance and consistency of any action undertaken. No matter how sophisticated the instruments used in developing and implementing forestry projects, the contradictory results of public assessments in different countries over the past ten years have shown that an unquestioned reliance on technical expertise and a systematic chain of implementation are no guarantee against what turn out to be serious errors and glaring negative examples, nor against the unforeseen ill-effects that are part and parcel of any complex process. Most administrations now recognize that no forestry policy will automatically bear good results simply by following the procedures approved, but that constant reassessment (national, provincial or international) is needed on the basis of indicators covering a wide range of concerns.
2) Public opinion is increasingly concerned about forests, as they are seen as archetypal images of nature. Moreover, traditional approaches to policy-making and information on forests are no longer being accepted in democratic societies where participation and transparency in decision-making are considered a right as well as a guarantee that opposing views will be heard. Forests are not protected islands totally cut off from the workings of the rest of society, and foresters on their own cannot hope to grasp and control all the factors affecting their choices and goals. Criteria and indicators are first and foremost useful tools in setting up dialogue with all those who claim a voice in forestry policies and how they are implemented.
3) In countries where the state does not have direct overall charge of forests, forest owners or concession holders are subject to certain constraints, adapting the broad outlines of national forestry policy to local economic, environmental, legal and social contexts. There are two major approaches here: that of imposing the use of certain methods, instruments or procedures and that of specifying the objectives or obligations to be met. The former has traditionally been preferred, but there is growing support for the latter, based on the assumption that local managers are in the best position to choose the most affective and cheapest methods, instruments or procedures once the public authorities have clearly defined the objectives. This use of decision-making criteria and indicators of results thus requires that norms be fixed for management units - a procedure not necessarily required for the two previous approaches.
4) To sway forest management according to their own analyses and priorities, some large environmental and consumer protection associations try to exert pressure on policy-makers or local managers by encouraging buyers to prefer products that are ecocertified over those that are merely tolerated or boycotted. An ecocertification procedure focuses on the quality of forest management and thus requires a prior definition of the criteria and indicators to be used as a basis for the guarantees that buyers are expected to demand. As with the previous point, this is basically a normative approach but it also raises the question of the choice and legitimacy of the structure that dictates these norms and gives credibility to ecocertification in the eyes of buyers. Theoretically, this normative approach can be applied equally well at the national or provincial levels where forestry policy is developed as at the management unit level. It can also be developed just as well in terms of methods, instruments and procedures as in terms of results.
In the context of issues 1 and 2, attention must be paid both to the absolute values of indicators and to the changes observed between two evaluations. Although absolute values are clearly important, they are largely dictated by the biogeographical context and the historical background to forestry policy; they flow from an observed situation in which the possibility of short-term (and often medium-term) action is bound to be limited, given the length of forest cycles and social resistance to any change. By contrast, changes are extremely important since they show the actual consequences of official goals, thus allowing a check on possible discrepancies between official pronouncements on forestry policy and its concrete outcome. Even when evaluation of a forestry policy or one of its aspects involves the examination of absolute values, this has to be done by referring to the objectives that the relevant government has freely set itself or that follow from negotiated and freely ratified international agreements. Although the importance of measuring changes is not forgotten in the framework of issues 3 and 4, the emphasis here is on absolute values, which are specified case by case and allow an evaluation of how closely a given instance of management is in line with a reference model, whether explicit or implicit.
The Helsinki and Tarapoto Processes, and to a large degree the Montreal Process, have very clearly chosen to emphasize issues 1 and 2, while the large international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have devoted their energy to issues 3 and 4. This does not mean that various governments involved in these processes are not also very sensitive to issues 3 and 4 (even if it is only the major northern wood-exporting countries and countries where NGOs have a powerful influence), but at present there is no intergovernmental consensus to move in this direction, despite consultations and work within individual countries and the growing number of international and European Union work groups on ecocertification. Similarly, the large NGOs cannot ignore issues 1 and 2, although their strategic concerns and analyses mean that they will attack - and often very forcefully - the priority given them by various countries. Moreover, the lists of criteria and indicators developed in response to issues 1 and 2 on the national or provincial level are not necessarily relevant to issues 3 and 4.
The identification of criteria and indicators is also a practical attempt to avoid the pitfalls of an overly theoretical approach that seeks to specify all the conditions for sustainable management in the abstract and to confine the provisional state of a technical-scientific and political-cultural consensus within a necessarily complex definition. The list of criteria and indicators adopted by the Helsinki and Montreal Processes reflects a compromise supported by both forest professionals and scientists. It encompasses indicators of both methods and results, since the very partial state of scientific knowledge means that we cannot yet do without the past centuries' experience with different methods. The main aim of the selection process has been to adopt scientifically relevant indicators whose measurement is technically feasible and whose cost is not prohibitive. While results are admittedly imperfect, progress in scientific knowledge and instruments and the questions raised by public opinion should allow the present list, which is already long, to be further expanded and systematized.
Although the lists adopted by the Helsinki and Montreal Processes are rooted in very different contexts (the level of human intervention in forests, the structure of landholdings, the antiquity of forest laws and regulations, etc.), they are in fact fairly similar. They take account of: traditional biological parameters (area, volume, biological growth, forest type, etc.) as well as those raised by the 1980s debate on acid rain (health and vitality of stands); traditional forest products (volume of felling and hunting) as well as aspects that have come to the fore in recent years (minor forest products, employment creation, participation in decisions on rural development); and the involvement of forestry both in general-interest protection missions that have long been recognized (soil and water) and in others that have developed more recently (biodiversity).
The current state of scientific knowledge and available inventories makes the concept of biodiversity a difficult one and means that indicators in this connection still require considerable refinement. Work on identifying species that indicate the healthy functioning of a given ecosystem is much more advanced for plants than animals, despite major North American reflection on the question. However, the main difference between the choices of the two processes hinges on the seventh criterion on the Montreal list - institutional aspects which does not appear on the European list. These aspects have long been taken into account in forestry in countries adhering to the Helsinki Process, and they reflect a national and cultural balance in Europe where pragmatic considerations take precedence over the kind of theoretical consistency that countries with more recent institutional forestry traditions would perhaps tend to emphasize.
No list of criteria and indicators can be used to evaluate and conduct a forestry policy without a reliable and consistent mechanism to measure and evaluate the indicators adopted. A permanent or periodic forest inventory is indispensable, but there is also the question of indicators that fall outside the usual scope of traditional inventories. In some cases, forest inventories must be developed in order to take these into account in terms of measurement in the field, how statistics are treated during data processing and the use of new instruments such as geographical information systems. In other cases, however, it would be too expensive and inefficient to provide forestry services with sophisticated new measurement instruments, especially if there are highly qualified specialist services, which is often the case for monitoring water quality or animal biodiversity. This should encourage foresters to expand cooperation with services with which they have had very little contact in the past and, furthermore, it will develop a new awareness of the impact of other policies on forests. Such a choice develops new working methods, requires an understanding of possible lines of cooperation and means that this new situation will be taken into account in the relevant international processes, especially within the regional offices of FAO. It enabled France to publish a list of national indicators for sustainable management as early as April 1955.
Old forestry countries have sets of statistics going back a long way which provide a valuable record of methods and definitions. As always when new international concerns appear, there is much discussion focusing on the attempt to standardize definitions and inventory methods, despite the failure of numerous previous attempts. In the present context, it is essential that the publication of indicators should always give the source of figures and the methods of calculation used in the case of indirect estimates in order to provide a public guarantee of the reliability of the figures and sometimes to specify limitations to their interpretation. Standardization is in fact vital in only two specific cases: for those advocating a supranational forestry policy (for example in a union framework for member countries of the European Union); and for those seeking to establish a consistent international mechanism for ecocertification supervised by a central authority. In the first case, the solution would have to entail payment for a supranational inventory parallel to national inventories and allowing a sufficient period for the old set of data to be replaced. In the second case, a normative approach based on absolute values and with no standardization of definitions or inventory methods can very soon create difficult issues concerning equity between the countries involved basically the wood-exporting countries not to mention equity between exporting countries subject to examination and importing countries.
Defining criteria and indicators for sustainable management at the level of management units is particularly problematic when these units cover too small an area. Units in Canada are set at a lower limit of 500 ha, which would rule out three-quarters of the wooded area of France. Furthermore, in the interest of financial viability and efficiency, it is vital to fix the lowest possible number of indicators for managers to incorporate into their reasoning and decisions. Biological complexities and the "holistic" character expected of sustainable management make such a selection process particularly difficult. If a series of small, independent forest properties were grouped together and treated as a single management unit, this would clearly mean that owners' rights would be subjected to the authority of biology experts, and most societies would be unwilling to accept this. It would also be unrealistic and politically foolish to consider insisting that certain goals must be met by hundreds of thousands (indeed millions, in France) of private owners of small forest plots whose main profession is in another activity. The only solution that would take this aspect into account entails a return to the obligation of using methods specified and monitored by the public authorities and the appraisal of quantitative results for the larger area covered by such a forestry policy. The sometimes very fragmented structure of forest landholdings is the reason why some European countries, including France, are extremely unwilling to address issues 3 and 4 in the absence of specific solutions to their problems.
In democratic countries where public opinion exerts a strong influence on political decision-makers, experience during negotiations over these lists has shown the importance of the cultural elements involved in the wish to take both issues 1 and 2 into account. Forestry is both a science and an art, and these two aspects cannot be separated; expertise and knowledge based on sometimes centuries of experience play an important role in the approach adopted by each country and each forestry tradition, although it is not always clear how much comes from practical experience and how much is a result of cultural values and judgement systems. The way that public opinion and NGOs see forests is also influenced by a given society's cultural values, concern over the future and relations with nature (albeit an imaginary rather than a real nature), and political decision-makers have to take this into account. It is thus inevitable that any articulated reflection or negotiations on criteria and indicators for sustainable management will be governed both by biological reality and by the way a given society views it under the imperfect control of available scientific information and economic constraints.
It would therefore seem pointless to hope that criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management could be anything other than the fleeting consensus of an international technocracy if such lists are jointly negotiated by countries that do not feel they have a common future, let alone a common cultural outlook, even if care has been taken to check that they have similar environmental, economic and social conditions as concerns the forestry sector. However desirable it may be, it is unrealistic to hope to negotiate a single worldwide list of indicators for sustainable forest management. On the other hand, it would be productive to encourage similar countries to join forces in order to draw up and implement such lists in the framework of open processes that allow each person or group (forest professionals, scientists and NGOs), whatever their country, to share its experiences and give public warnings against choices that do not pay adequate attention to available scientific knowledge and the common interest in assuming joint responsibility for the biosphere. Respect for the guidelines that would result from this would already represent considerable progress. Mutual recognition of these lists would in itself show the political intention of every country to move in the direction indicated in the Declaration of Forest Principles.
Unless this takes place, progress on criteria for sustainable management may indeed be made after long drawn-out technical and political negotiations, but such an agreement is not likely to go beyond a very limited group of traditional forestry indicators, unless the consequences of contemporary reflection on sustainable management are taken seriously. Another possibility would be to let scientists draw up such lists on their own, but this ignores the shortcomings of scientific knowledge in the forestry sector, the slow speed at which scientific consensus tends to be reached, the very uneven distribution of researchers in different parts of the world and the fact that scientists are not culturally neutral when asked to transform knowledge into expertise. The last possibility would be to leave economic forces free licence concerning ecocertification, letting buyers and sellers fight it out and letting donors impose their own criteria and indicators when negotiating the terms for development aid. In the case of many such solutions, it is clear that any instrument that might have helped the practical pursuit of progress in sustainable management would be robbed of its attraction for those concerned.
An approach in terms of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management offers such a good response to a whole series of negative developments in modern-day societies, including a wide variety of requirements, that it cannot be seen as a passing fashion in international forestry. Over the past four years, some exceptionally rich and stimulating work has produced solid gains, but has also raised many thorny questions that technical and political exponents are not yet in a position to solve. However, the development of forestry policies in many countries where forests play a major economic, environmental or social role will depend to a considerable extent on these answers.
