Forest Tenure and Sustainable Forest Management

Global forestry problems such as deforestation, degradation, and biodiversity loss have persisted for decades. More recently, new challenges have been identified, such as atmospheric carbon capture and storage in forests and the role they fulfill in global climate change mitigation efforts. Various public, private, and nongovernmental efforts have been developed and implemented to address these problems and many new international, regional, local, and private forest institutions have been developed in the last decade in order to improve forest conditions and retention. Tenure arrangements and reform have been identified as crucial components among the many new policies and institutions introduced for improving sustainable forest management.

In this paper, in order to empirically assess the effects of forest tenure on sustainable forest management, the authors analyzed aggregate FAO data for selected countries in the world, supplemented by the results of numerous country and case studies.

First, they analyzed basic forest ownership data for major world regions and their most forested countries. Second, they examined data about the status, management, and environmental conditions of forest resources and their correlations with forest tenure and sustainable forest management. Last, they examined the influence of population, economic variables, property rights scores, and freedom from corruption on sustainable forest management. Besides, the authors also estimated Pearson correlation statistics among many of the key variables.

The results showed the institutional design principles suggested by Ostrom were well accepted for applications to public, communal, and private lands. Whatever form a forest management institution takes (public, private, communal), to be effective it must have clear and legitimate rules regarding who has access and use rights to forests; monitoring and enforcement mechanisms with sufficient resources; and sanctions for rule breaking. The analyses of countries as a whole suggest that problems of forest land loss and sustainable forest management are related to the amount of public land and the difference between developed and developing countries. Larger areas of public land appear to be hard to maintain in forests, either through mere logistical problems or due to outright governance and tenure problems. Developed countries have largely achieved a stable level of land use and resource extraction after centuries of exploitation of forests and natural resources, while developing countries are still proceeding along the Kuznet’s curve, and exploiting and deforesting in order to achieve higher levels of economic well being.

Article by Jacek P. Siry, et al, from USA and Puerto Rico.

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