Changing Governance of the World's Forests
Arun Agrawal,1*
Ashwini Chhatre,2
Rebecca Hardin3
Major features of contemporary forest governance include decentralization of forest management, logging concessions in publicly owned commercially valuable 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 increasingly independent of formal ownership. Growing and competing demands for food, biofuels, timber, and environmental services 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 forest governance and deeper attention to the factors that lead to effective governance, beyond ownership patterns, is necessary to address future forest governance challenges.
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{at}umich.edu
