The Basic Assessment Guide for Human Well-Being (or The BAG) focuses on the social criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, a topic that has been the subject of considerable controversy and uncertainty. It is designed for people interested in assessing sustainable forest management, but who do not have a high degree of expertise in social sciences. The six simple methods described in this manual are designed for use by biophysical scientists with a college education.

This manual provides a comprehensive set of criteria and indicators (C&I) for sustainable forest management based on CIFOR’s research. This research was conducted by interdisciplinary teams of experts in large-scale natural forests managed for commercial timber production in Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil and Cameroon, with additional sites in Germany, Austria and USA. The use of the term ‘generic template’, for these C&I is intended to prevent them being confused with an ideal and universally applicable set of C&I.

In 1994 Cameroon adopted a new forest law that focussed on the large-scale, export-oriented industrial forest sector while timber produced through small-scale logging for the domestic market was ignored, even in official statistics, and is generally produced without a valid permit. As Cameroon prepares to implement the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) it recently signed with the European Union, promising a legal framework for all national timber production, this occasional paper presents a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the country’s domestic timber market.

Berau district has been one of East Kalimantan’s largest sources of timber since the mid-1980s. Until the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, most of the district’s formal timber production was conducted by large-scale HPH concession holders, and the vast majority of the fiscal revenues generated flowed to the national government. Over the last several years, considerable volumes of logs have also been harvested illegally both by timber concessionaires and by small-scale manual loggers.

This study focuses on the impacts of decentralisation on forests and estate crops in the original districts of Kampar and Indragiri Hulu, located in Riau Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The research was conducted during 2000, preceding the beginnings of decentralisation in January 2001, with a brief follow-up to March of that year. It was important to chart attitudes to decentralisation at provincial level, as well as examine the deconcentration of the regional office of the Jakarta-based Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops.

Malinau District, established through partition in 1999, is the largest district in East Kalimantan and contains some of its largest tracts of forest. With decentralization, the district has sought to generate revenues from its forests, but these efforts have been handicapped by a concurrent lack of institutional capacities to manage rapid forest exploitation and conflicts over claims. Timber extraction and utilization permits (Izin Pemungutan dan Pemanfaatan Kayu or IPPK) have been the main instrument for revenue generation, with 39 IPPK covering 56,000 ha.

The report describes the impacts of forestry decentralization on district finance, local communities and spatial planning, drawing on an 18-month research project in Bulungan District in East Kalimantan Province. It describes forestry management policies following the implementation of regional autonomy, and their impacts on district revenue and local livelihoods. The authors analyze district spatial planning, forest land use and community control over forest lands.

The Grab Bag: Supplementary Methods for Assessing Human Well-being is designed to complement The BAG. The Grab Bag is designed for use by social scientists who may find The BAG overly prescriptive. The eight methods presented are either more difficult for non-social scientists to use or, in a couple of cases, can substitute for one or more method presented in The BAG. Again, The Scoring and Analysis Guide provides the user with help in making an actual assessment of the social C&I, based on the results of these methods.

This study adopts an institutional approach to analyze the way in which informal rules, in their interaction with formal rules, shape the use of forest resources by diverse types of smallholders and communities (i.e., indigenous people, agro-extractive and traditional communities) in Latin America. Attention is given to understanding the ‘working rules’, comprising both formal and informal rules, that individuals use in making their decisions for land and forest resources access and use, which in turn affect benefits generation and distribution from such resources use.

The United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) commissioned this report from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) to summarize the current state of negotiations towards a decision in Copenhagen, specifically outlining areas of consensus, options for resolving areas where consensus has not yet been reached, and priorities for research to support successful implementation of an international REDD Programme following a decision at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhage

This paper provides an economic perspective on concepts related to adaptive co-management (ACM). The discussion is cast within a formal generalised complex system (CS) framework. The authors explicitly explore the hypothesis of whether ACM can be regarded as an emergent strategy under specific conditions. The conditions draw a corollary from the well-known work of Adam Smith that describes 'self interest' as a forcing factor (the 'invisible hand) that lead to stability and efficiency in economic systems.