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DOI: 10.1126/science.1155369
, 1460 (2008); 320Science
et al.Arun Agrawal,
Changing Governance of the World's Forests
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natural forest regeneration (23). Short-term
solutions are attractive, but forest regeneration
and restoration are long-term processes that
can take a century or more. Plantations have a
high rate of failure if few tree species are
planted and they are not well suited to site
conditions. Of 98 publicly funded reforested
areas in Brazil, only 2 were successful (25). It
is essential to plan for long-term returns on
restoration investments if future forests are to
support the wide range of species, species in-
teractions, and ecosystem services present in
current forests.
Ambitious efforts are being mounted to re-
store forests, ecosystem ser vices, and bio-
diversity throughout the world. The Riparian
Forest Restoration Project hopes to reforest
1 million ha of riparian rainforest in the At-
lantic Rainforest in São Paulo, Brazil, with up
to 800 native species (25). Forest restoration
efforts, whether at national, regional, or local
scales, will take many decades, long-term fi-
nancing, political will, labor, and personal
commitment. In the process, these efforts will
also restore new relationships between people
and forests. As so clearly stated by William R.
Jordan III, a founder of the field of restoration
ecology, “Ultimately, the future of a natural eco-
system depends not on protection from humans
but on its relationship with the people who in-
habit it or share the landscape with it” (26).
References and Notes
1. L. R. Walker, J. Walker, R. J. Hobbs, Eds., Linking
Restoration and Ecological Succession (Springer, New
York, 2007).
2. FAO, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005: Progress
Towards Sustainable Forest Management (FAO, Rome,
2005).
3. P. E. Kauppi et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103,
17574 (2006).
4. A. Grainger, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 818
(2008).
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Report (China Forestry Publishing House, Beijing, 2005 to
2007).
6. D. B. Lindenmayer, R. J. Hobbs, Biol. Conserv. 119, 151
(2004).
7. J. Barlow et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104, 18555
(2007).
8. C. Sabogal, R. Nasi, in Forest Restoration in Landscapes:
Beyond Planting Trees, S. Mansourian , D. Vallauri, N. Dudley,
Eds. (Springer, New York, 2005), pp. 361–369.
9. International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO),
Guidelines for the Restoration, Management and
Rehabilitation of Deg raded and Secondary Tropical
Forests (ITTO, Yokohama, Japan, 2002)
10. R. J. Hobbs et al., Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr. 15, 1 (2006).
11. R. L. Chazdon, Perspect. Plant Ecol. Evol. Syst. 6,51
(2003).
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Evol. 23, 104 (2008).
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Restoration and Ecological Succession, L. R. Walker,
J. Walker, R. J. Hobbs, Eds. (Springer, New York, 2007),
pp. 121–149.
14. D. Lamb, P. D. Erskine, J. Parrotta, Science 310, 1628
(2005).
15. J. K. Zimmerman, T. M. Aide, A. E. Lugo, in Old Fields:
Dynamics and Restoration of Abandoned Farmland,
V. A. Cramer, R. J. Hobbs, Eds. (Island Press, Washington,
2007), pp. 51–74.
16. C. A. Harvey et al., Conserv. Biol. 22, 8 (2008).
17. U. Chokkalingam et al., in Forest Restoration in
Landscapes: Beyond Planting Trees, S. Mansourian,
D. Vallauri, N. Dudley, Eds. (Springer, New York, 2005),
pp. 405–414.
18. M. Poffenberger, Int. J. Environ. Sustain. Dev. 5, 57 (2006).
19. G. Monela, S. Chamshama, R. Mwaipopo, D. Gamassa,
A Study on the Social, Economic and Environmental
Impacts of Forest Landscape Restoration in Shinyanga
Region, Tanzania (The United Republic of Tanzania
Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, Forestry, and
Beekeeping Division, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and IUCN,
The World Conservation Union, Eastern Africa Regional
Office, Nairobi, Kenya, 2004).
20. A. B. Sampaio, K. D. Holl, A. Scariot, Restor. Ecol. 15,
462 (2007).
21. W. F. Laurance et al., Ecology 87, 469 (2006).
22. S. D. Cote, T. P. Rooney, J.-P. Tremblay, C. Dussault,
D. M. Waller, Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 35, 113
(2004).
23. S. Diaz et al., J. Veg. Sci. 15, 295 (2004).
24. L. Ciccarese, S. Brown, B. Schlamadinger, in Restoration
of Boreal and Temperate Forests, J. A. Stanturf,
P. Madsen, Eds. (CRC Press, Boca Raton , FL, 2005),
pp. 111–120.
25. B. Wuethrich, Science 315, 1070 (2007).
26. W. R. Jordan III, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration
and the New Communion with Nature (Berkeley, Univ. of
California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2003).
27. I thank N. Norden, V. Boukili, S. Letcher, J. P. Arroyo
Mora, R. K. Colwell, and two anonymous reviewers
for helpful comments on the manuscript and National
Science Foundation Grant DEB-0639393 for research
support.
10.1126/science.1155365
PERSPECTIVE
Changing Governance of the
World’s Forests
Arun Agrawal,
1
* Ashwini Chhatre,
2
Rebecca Hardin
3
Major features of c ontemporary forest governance include decentralization of forest
management, logging concessions in publicly owned commercially v aluable forests, and timber
certification, primarily in temperate forests. Although a majority of forests continue to be
owned formally by governments, the effectiveness of forest governance is incr easingly
independent o f formal ownership. Grow ing and competing demands for food, biofuels, timber,
and environmental servi ces will pose severe challenges to effective forest governance in the
future, especially in conjunction with the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. A greater
role for community and market actors in fore st governance and deeper attention t o the factors
that lead to effective governance, beyond ownership patterns, is necess ary to address future
forest governance challenges.
C
entral governments own by far the
greater proportion—about 86%—of the
5.4 billion hectares of the world’s for-
ests and wooded areas. Private and “other”
(mostly communal) forms of ownership con-
stitute just over 10% and below 4% of global
forests, respectively (1). There are important
regional variations around these averages [Fig.
1, based on (1)]. Official statistics on forest
ownership, however, misrepresent the extent of
and changes in forest cover (2). They also mis-
represent the nature and changing forms of global
forest governance.
Effective governance is central to improved
forest cover and change outcomes. Changing
forest governance today is for the most part a
move away from centrally administered, top-
down regulatory policies that characterized
much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many
government-owned forests are managed as
common property for multiple uses by local
communities and community-based organiza-
tions (3). Many other forests classified under
public ownership are effectively governed as
private timber concessions by logging com-
panies (4). Civil society organizations and mar-
ket incentives increasingly play a role in forest
governance through certification processes and
changing consumer preferences (5). At the same
time, the growth in the number and size of strict
protected areas in the latter half of the 20th cen-
tury has also meant that ~ 6.4 million km
2
of
publicly owned forests are now under govern-
ance regimes that involve greater restrictions
on human use and habitation (6, 7) (fig. S1).
In the 21st century, three important forest
governance trends stand out: (i) decentralization
1
School of Natural Resources and Environment, University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
2
Department of
Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
3
Department of Anthropology and
School of Natural Resources and Environment, University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
arunagra@umich.edu
13 JUNE 2008 VOL 320 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org1460
Forests in Flux
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of management, especially for commercially
low-value forests that nonetheless play an im-
portant role in the livelihoods of hundreds of
millions of rural households in developing
countries; (ii) the substantial role of logging
companies in forest concessions, typically for
selective logging in tropical forests; and (iii) the
growing importance of market-oriented certifi-
cation efforts, mainly in temperate forests in the
developed world.
Decentralization of forestry policies began
in the mid- to late 1980s and had become a
prominent feature of forest governance by the
mid-1990s (8, 9). It was impelled in part by
infusions of material and technical support
from bilateral, multilateral, and private donors
who sought better forest governance from
recipient countries. These external pressures
coincided with domestic demands for a greater
recognition of local communities’ needs for
forest products and their role in managing local
forests for multiple purposes (10). They also
worked in the same direction as the desire of
many governments to reduce the financial bur-
den of forest governance in an economic con-
text characterized by substantial fiscal and
budgetary pressures. An emerging body of
scholarly work on local participation, resource
institutions, governance, and accountability
helped provide some justification for decentral-
ization reforms (11 , 12). Decentralization
reforms in the past two decades have often
promoted local, more democratic participation
in governance. In tandem with policy advocacy
and social movements, such reforms have fos-
tered new practices of forest use, sometimes
provoking social tensions revolving around
claims of indigenous peoples within forest
zones (10). Overall, local communities and
organizations have come to govern close to an
additional 200 million hectares of forests
compared to the 1980s (13, 14).
The private concession model in forest
governance has been in existence at least since
the imperial trades of the early 1700s, endur-
ing shifts in commodity values, political sys-
tems, and changing forest policy frameworks
(15). Under concessionary forest governance,
central governments or forest departments
provide logging companies with lon g-term
resource extraction rights in commercially
valuable forests in exchange for a stream of
revenues. Although a variety of logging con-
cessions arrangements also exist in the devel-
oped world, they are a dominant form of forest
governance in tropical forests in Southeast
Asia, parts of the Amazon, and especially in
Central and West Africa, where at least 75
million hectares of forests are under concession
to logging companies (4). Contemporary gov-
ernance through forest concessions is prompted
by demand for logs and timber—often in dis-
tant markets—and governments’ need for reve-
nues. The limited enforcement of concession
agreements in most countries in Southeast Asia
and Africa has also meant that legal logging in
concessions exists side by side with costly and
unsustainable levels of illegal logging (16).
The World Bank estimates U.S. $15 billion to
be lost to developing countries every year as a
result of illegal logging.
Forest certification initiatives emerged in
the early 1990s as market instruments in which
an independent certification body provides an
assurance to consumers that forest product
suppliers have conformed to some predeter-
mined criteria of sustainable forest manage-
ment (17). Certification efforts were launched
as a way to improve the sustainability of trop-
ical forest management. Yet they have been
used far more broadly in temperate forests—
Total Africa
Total North America
Public Private Other
Total Oceania Total South America
Total Asia Total Europe
Fig. 1. Distribution of forest ownership by world regions.
Decentralized
and community-based
forest governance
Concessions and
private market influence
on forest governance
Certification and
market-incentive–based
environmental
instruments
Donor
influence
Direct and
indirect
impacts of
climate change
Growing
international
concern about
deforestation
Social pressures
and local
demands for
greater
governance role
Lower investment
by governments
International
environmental NGOs
Consumption
pressures from
demographic
changes and
living standard
improvements
Fig. 2. Changes in forest governance and their social, economic, and political drivers.
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 320 13 JUNE 2008
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SPECIALSECTION
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less than 10% of 80 million hectares of cer-
tified forests in 2000 were in the humid tropics
(18). Certification processes and performance
standards are expanding into new regions and
niches as a market and civil society response to
public concern about deforestation, the organi-
zational strength of international environmen-
tal nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
and continuing economic globalization (5).
Decentralization, concession, and certification-
related trends in forest governance are the result
of important social, economic, and political
drivers (Fig. 2).
The role of drivers mentioned in Fig. 2 is
likely to be reinforced and made more complex
by climate change. Existing trends around con-
version of forests to biofuel plantations, for
example, are likely to affect both biodiversity
and the livelihoods of the poor adversely.
In conjunction with competing demands for
food and forest products from a growing, and
on the average wealthier, global population,
climate change impacts will strengthen gov-
ernance trends (especially in the direction of
concessions and certification), increase the in-
volvement of market actors in forest governance,
and create pressures toward greater formali-
zation as governments seek to take advantage
of emerging carbon funds. The intersection of
production strategies for food, fuel, and forest
products as competition grows for scarce land
will inevitably lead to new experiments with
governance arrangements at all levels, from the
local to the international. It can potentially re-
verse contemporary trends in favor of the
involvement of civil society actors and com-
munities, instead promot ing greater privat-
ization. The need for making careful choices
in this regard will become especially critical
after the next two decades as the joint effects of
changes in climate, demographic patterns, and
living standards begin to be felt more acutely
(19).
The effectiveness of forest governance is
only partly explained by who owns forests. At
the local level, existing research finds only a
limited association between whether forests
are under private, public, or common ownership
and changes in forest cover or sustainability of
forest management (11). National-level asso-
ciation between forest area under different
forms of ownership and changes in forest
cover is also relatively weak, especially for
public ownership [Spearman’s rho for pro-
portion of forests under public ownership and
forest cover change = 0.017, P > |t| = 0.98,
based on data in ( 1)]. At the regional level, the
greatest net declines in forests have occurred
in tropical countries. Conversely, net increases
in forest cover have occurred primarily in
North America and Europe (see figs. S2 and
S3 for illustration). However, the relationship
between this pattern and forest ownership is
limited. Moreover, there is only partial knowl-
edge about the relationships between the
condition of forests, different forms of forest
ownership, and th e multiple objectives of
forest governance—improvements in income,
livelihoods, biodiversity, carbon sequestration,
and ecosystem service provision.
The need to look deeper, therefore, into
how governance arrangements work is para-
mount if forest dwellers, users, managers, and
policy-makers are to make better choices
about forest governance at a variety of scales.
A very large number of factors influences the
effectiveness and outcomes of forest govern-
ance (20, 21). Among these, careful definition
of user rights and responsibilities in forests,
greater participation by those who use and
depend on forests, downward and horizontal
accountability of decision-makers, better mon-
itoring of forest outcomes, stronger enforce-
ment of property rights and governance
arrangements, and investments in institution-
al capacities at local, regional, and national
levels have been identified as critically im-
portant for more effective forest governance in
tropical country contexts.
Broadly speaking, the goal of forest con-
servation has historically not been met when
in conflict with land use changes driven by the
demand for food, fuel, and profit. It is nec-
essary to recognize and advocate for better
governance of forests more strongly given the
importance of forests in meeting basic human
needs in the future, making resources availa-
ble for livelihoods and development, main-
taining ecosystems and biodiversity, and
addressing climate change mitigation and
adaptation goals. Such advocacy must be
coupled with financial incentives for govern-
ments of developing countries and a greater
governance role for civil society and market
actors if forests are to continue to provide
benefits to humans well into the future.
Many scholars recognize the central im-
portance of governance in influencing forest
outcomes, but a review also shows major gaps
in existing knowledge about the history and
distribution of forest governance arrangements
and in the understanding of how different
features of governance affect outcomes. The
challenge of understanding the coupled social
and ecological systems (22) that all forest
governance represents urgently needs more
emphasis and attention than it has received
until now.
References and Notes
1. Food and Agriculture Organization, Global Forest
Resources Assessment 2005 (FAO, Rome, 2005).
2. A. Grainger, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 818
(2008).
3. T. M. Hayes, World Dev. 34, 2064 (2006).
4. A. Karsenty, Overview of Industrial Forest Concessions
and Concession-Based Industry in Central and West Africa
(Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche
Agronomique pour le Développement, Paris, 2007).
5. B. Cashore, F. Gale, E. Meidinger, D. Newsom,
Confronting Sustainability: Forest Certification in
Developing and Transitioning Countries (Yale University,
New Haven, CT, 2006).
6. P. West, J. Igoe, D. Brockington, Annu. Rev. Anthropol.
35, 251 (2006).
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(2006).
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M. Schmink, Environmental Governance and the
Emergence of Forest-Based Social Movements (Center for
International Forestry Research, Bogor, 2008).
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(2003).
12. E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge Univ.
Press, New York, 1990).
13. A. Molnar, S. J. Scherr, A. Khare, Who Conserves the
World’s Forests? (Forest Trends, Washington DC,
2004).
14. A. White, A. Martin, Who Owns the World’ s Forests?
(Forest Trends, Washington DC, 2002).
15. R. Hardin, Concessionary Politics in the Congo Basin
(WP #6, Institutions and Governance Program, World
Resources Institute, Washington, DC, 2002).
16. M. Keller et al., Front. Ecol. Environ 5, 213 (2007).
17. E. E. Meidinger, Hum. Ecol. Rev. 4, 52 (1997).
18. Food and Agriculture Org anization, Global Forest
Resources Assessment 2000 (FAO, Rome, 2001).
19. Rights and Resources Initiative, Transitions in Forest
Tenure and Governance: Drivers, Projected Patterns and
Implications (RRI, Washington, DC, 2007).
20. A. Agrawal, A. Chhatre, World Dev. 34, 149 (2006).
21. E. Ostrom, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104, 15181
(2007).
22. J. Liu et al., Science 317, 1513 (2007).
23. The authors thank B. Adhikari, K. Andersson, D. Brown,
C. Gibson, J. McAlpine, E. Ostrom, J. Ribot, and two
anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier
draft of the paper and R. Kornak, J. Miller, and A. Beata
for help in preparing the maps. We gratefully
acknowledge support from the Ford Foundation, the
MacArthur Foundation, and two NSF grants numbered
HSD-0527138 and CNH-0709545.
Supporting Online Material
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5882/1460/DC1
Figs. S1 to S3
References
10.1126/science.1155369
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