Effective management of natural resources can be constrained or facilitated by their institutional frameworks, and policy to practice transfer challenges. The questions at the centre of this paper are: to what extent does implementation of forest interventions follow their policies, and what challenges exist for policy to practice transfers? In Ghana, the policy of the Social Responsibility Agreement (SRA) devolves decisionmaking powers to local authorities to represent the interest of communities in benefit share accruing from timber harvesting. By following two concluded SRAs in western Ghana through ethnography and semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the extent the SRA negotiation process emulated the policy, and with what challenges and outcomes. Lessons are drawn to inform practitioners, policy makers or researchers who aim to strengthen the policy implementation process.

The forestry sector is generally transitioning towards becoming more inclusive, responsive and responsible, thus creating an increasingly dynamic professional environment. Many universities are thus broadening the scope of traditional forestry programmes towards a more transdisciplinary paradigm. This paper assesses the transdisciplinary approach used in a Natural Resource and Environmental Governance programme in Ghana. It identifies students' motivations for choosing this transdisciplinary programme and determines how the programme satisfies their future career aspirations. The study reveals that students prefer transdisciplinarity because they expect it will make them more versatile, thus offering better job prospects. Our study also shows that although the programme exhibits features of transdisciplinarity, its collaborations beyond academia is still rather limited. Despite this, we found that the programme largely satisfies the aspirations of most students, except those with non-academic career aspirations. The paper concludes by arguing that transdisciplinary education requires a supportive institutional environment.

Throughout recent decades, in the context of forest planning and management there has been an increasing demand for stakeholders' and citizens' involvement in the decision-making process. The investigation of stakeholders’ preferences in participatory forest planning has become of paramount importance in understanding priorities and preventing conflicts. This paper is aimed at combining a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach, such as pairwise comparison and value measurement model, in order to assess stakeholders’ preferences for different goods and services provided by forests. The analysis of the results focused on assessing how pairwise comparison is able to heighten the information that can be obtained by the application of the value measurement model. The research was conducted within a framework of a Forest Landscape Management Plan (FLMP) in a case study in Southern Italy. 99 stakeholders were involved in the survey in order to analyze their preferences towards goods and services provided by forests (26 institutional actors, 44 technicians of public sector, 7 NGOs and 22 actors of agricultural-forest sector). Findings from the study highlighted that the pairwise comparison method made possible a first ranking of preferences that could be a useful tool to orientate forest planners in defining the priorities of FLMP.

This article explores the competition over rights to land that plays out in the process of applying for formal recognition of hutan desa (village forest); a new form of community forest management in Indonesia. Despite its community rights origins, the hutan desa recognition process creates a ‘first come first served’ situation, in which the first applicant for an area of forest becomes the land use owner, but not necessarily based on their legitimate rights to the forest area. This case study of a Dayak Modang community in East Kalimantan offers a lesson for community forestry implementation in Indonesia. It highlights the need to adjust imbalances of power among actors — within and or among local communities, companies, and the various levels of government — involved in the process of securing hutan desa. The regulation implementing hutan desa must consider uneven power between actors; more adaptive process with requesting parties recognised as co-management parties is needed to achieve a just outcome for local communities.

In rural African settings, people maintain diversified livelihood strategies to reduce risks and garner income. Although youth are currently the dominant demographic and an important group within forest communities of Central Africa, little is known about their dependence on the forest for their livelihoods. Given that young people are underrepresented in research studies, this study aimed to understand whether young people (aged 19–30) gain a large proportion of their livelihood from forest resources (including agroforestry). Focus groups and surveys were conducted in six villages in Eastern Cameroon to identify subsistence and income-driven activities of young people. In the context of many changes, young people continue to derive a large proportion of their livelihood from forest resources, especially agroforestry. Changes in livelihood activities were noted in the gender division of work and access to resources. Environmental pressure is likely to impact the livelihoods of these forest communities into the future.

Mainstream transparency and accountability (T&A) mechanisms in the natural resources sector – and the forestry sub-sector in particular — have, to a large extent, outpaced research while the relevant theoretical development is underactive further behind research. As a result, the sector is characterized by various technical and apolitical T&A systems and interventions that are not embedded in robust conceptual frameworks or well defined theory. This article employed several conceptual metaphors and propositions in the natural and non-natural resources sectors and the notion of thinking and working politically (TWP), to develop a framework for advancing, integrating and assessing T&A. The researcher proceeded to test its practicability in an alleged ‘best case’ of participatory forest management (PFM) in Tanzania — the latter is also a foundational requirement for the Reduced Emissions for Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) initiative. The empirical lessons relating to several T&A pillars, pathways and mediating factors are expounded in the article.

In recent years, public-private partnerships (PPPs) concepts have attracted attention of the government of Zambia. Policies and legal frameworks have been developed and updated to promote PPPs in the country, particularly in infrastructure development, health and energy sectors. However, the forestry industry has not been listed among priority sectors for PPP development due to inadequate information about the subsector. The aim of this study was to identify preconditions for the development of PPPs in the forestry sector and to provide information that may be pertinent for partnerships in the processing industry. Based on the information from secondary sources, over 6.7 million m³ of wood, distributed across the country, was estimated as a requirement for sustainable supply for industrial processing. The PPP potential areas include forest conservation, afforestation, value addition, bioenergy production. Formation of a private timber development agency is a major precondition to the development PPPs for SMEs in Zambia.

A growing body of evidence points to the effectiveness of indigenous territories in reducing tropical deforestation, and global development goals call for increased legal recognition of indigenous land tenure. Yet indigenous land tenure systems are typically complex and multi-layered, and as such remain poorly understood in terms of the pathways through which embedded layers, rules, and norms influence the use and maintenance of forests. This paper illustrates one example of this multi-layered tenure in the case of indigenous communities in the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé, a semi-autonomous, shared territory in western Panama. While the comarca holds one formal collective title, research across five communities reveals an informal system of forest ownership that influences how forest resources are managed, and that has implications for longer-term forest conservation efforts. The findings show that indigenous households use and manage a wide range of plant species, but that access to forest resources is uneven, and pressure on existing forests continues to increase, even from within the comarca through population growth. Mature forest surrounding the communities is held in de facto ownership by individuals and families who restrict access to resources, and this informal tenure system appears to be slowing deforestation, at least over the short-term. Many of these forest stewards wish to protect at least part of the forest over the long-term, while several forest parcels are being kept in reserve for the next generation of farmers. This hidden form of forest tenure, embedded within the communally-held lands of the comarca, highlights an important research need for those looking to improve the effectiveness of forest conservation programs in reducing deforestation and improving indigenous livelihoods.

Joint forest management (JFM) in India has been instrumental in changing the socioeconomic lives of forest dependent communities (FDCs) from being forest-centered to one based on the money economy. JFM has resulted in the elite capture of forest resources, and enabled regeneration of degraded forests though the evidence on the quality of regeneration is mixed. The government records suggest that with the drying up of donor funds for the JFM program. FDCs are losing interest and many JFM committees are now defunct in many states. Finally, JFM related work compels forest officials to spend more resources on a disproportionately small swathe of forest land which may have implications for biodiversity conservation in the long run. The study advocates privatization of forests as a possible alternative option to address these concerns, and enable the transition of our traditional linear economy towards a circular economy.