International forest governance regimes: Reconciling concerns on timber legality and forest-based livelihoods

Traditionally, national governments have had the task of formulating the norms and rules (policies) for managing forests as well as implementing the related procedures and programs. The policies focused on governing the forestry sector, which was characterized by a closed corporatist structure consisting of a tightly defined group of professionals from the government and the timber industry (Westoby, 1989). This conventional focus on national forest regimes based on governmental rules and procedures have greatly changed in the last thirty years. Prompted by global concerns about the high rates of deforestation and lack of sustainable forest management in tropical countries since the 1990s much attention has been given to the development of a global forest regime. Such a regime is characterized by a set of convergent principles, norms, rules, procedures and programs for governing the interaction between people and forest resources (Rayner et al., 2010). The development of such a global forest regime should be accomplished through an inclusive approach towards good forest governance (Rayner et al., 2010; Arts and Visseren-Hamakers, 2012). This governance approach is based on the consideration that forest conservation and sustainable management involves the reconciliation of different ecologically, economically and socially oriented forest values held by various stakeholder groups. It requires multi-stakeholder processes for decision-making on and implementation of forest use and management with specific attention to the equitable access of different stakeholders to these processes (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006; Rayner et al., 2010).