Understanding Long-Term Impacts in the Forest Sector

The international development community
is increasingly demanding better evidence on the
effectiveness of policies and programs across different
sectors. The forest sector is no exception. Governments and
donor agencies explicitly seek to link investment to proven
impact. Yet the evidence base necessary to inform
interventions in the forest sector that can successfully
enhance the livelihoods of the forest-dependent poor, foster
economic growth, reduce emissions from deforestation and
degradation, and conserve forest biodiversity remains weak.
There is a particular need to identify robust indicators to
track and assess the impacts of forest-related investments.
The Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) 2013 review of the
Forests Strategy of the World Bank, the largest multilateral
funding source in the sector, and the subsequent Committee
on Development Effectiveness (CODE) report highlighted this
need. The IEG recommended the development of outcome
indicators on sustainable forest management to track
progress across the World Bank’s Forests Strategy. The 2013
CODE report highlighted the imperative to develop short-term
proxy indicators for long-term impacts in the forest sector.
To date, however, there is little systematic knowledge on
the availability of such predictive proxies in the sector,
what form they should take, and the conditions under which
they are effective. This PROFOR-financed study responds to
this gap in knowledge and to broader demand from donors,
government agencies, and implementing organizations to
develop robust, yet practical means to better understand the
impacts of forest sector investments. It focuses in
particular on potential predictive proxies for longer-term
term outcomes and suggests that such indicators do in fact
exist. The report identifies a set of theory-based
predictive proxy indicators (PPIs) relevant to one or more
overarching development objectives: poverty reduction and
economic growth, biodiversity conservation, climate change
mitigation and adaption, and good governance.