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.
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
