Balancing concerns on timber legality and improving forest-based livelihoods

 Greater attention for law enforcement resulting from new forest governance initiatives may make livelihoods of people living in or near protected areas in the tropicsmore vulnerable due to restricted access and competing claims. This paper aims to provide a deeper insight into the livelihoods of inhabitants of the Tano Offin Globally Significant Biodiversity Area (GSBA) in Ghana's high forest zone and howthese are becoming under greater pressure. It assesses the governance implications of the implementation of the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) under the Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) ActionPlanof the EuropeanUnion and projects within the framework of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus (REDD+),with a focus on the need for social safeguards. The study shows that the inhabitants of admitted villages in GSBAs already have few legal livelihood options due to restricted access to the forest, which results in competing claims among resource users and with forest managers. Stronger law enforcement resulting from the FLEGT/VPA to combat illegal logging and the Ghana Forestry Commission's consideration to include GSBAs in its REDD+ programme is likely to further restrict inhabitants' access to forest resources, with the result being increasing competition for scarce resources. Social safeguards therefore need serious consideration when implementing new forest governance regimes. The authors argue that the politics of protected areas need to reconsider the position of the inhabitants by creating space to build a livelihood, paying them for taking care of nature or relocating them beyond the protected area. This might involve hard choices. What eventually is needed is a change towards interactive governance and adaptive co-management.

The Modified Taungya System (MTS) is a strategy employed by the Ghana Government to restore forest cover, address timber deficits and contribute to rural livelihoods. Under the scheme, farmers combine tree planting andmaintenance with the cultivation of food crops until tree canopy closure. This paper aims to generate lessons from theMTS with respect to its role as a social safeguard against the likely adverse impacts of the implementation of the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) between Ghana and the EU to combat illegal logging, using the six social safeguard dimensions identified by the IoI Project Team (2010). It addresses the question of what the major dimensions of social safeguards are and how the MTS does relate to these characteristics. Based on a survey of 146 MTS farmers and qualitative methods, results revealed that the MTS potentially meets several of the social safeguard mechanisms distinguished by the IoI Project Team (legal security for forest users, soft law enforcement by creating incentives for adaptation, benefit sharing, capacity building, alternative livelihoods/employment and expanding the resource base). The most promising of these is based on the expansion of areas with planted trees that will become available as legal timber in the future. However, the potential safeguards will only materialise if several institutional and management challenges are addressed. 

Negotiating a policy change involves formation of coalitions of actors in a particular policy subsystem with substantial mobilisation of resources to deploy strategic actions to direct the outcome of the process to a certain interest. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been demonstrated as a useful heuristic framework to explain policy change within a particular political system. This study applies the ACF to the negotiation of a policy change for the supply of timber to the domestic market in Ghana. The study largely confirms selected coalition hypotheses and makes a contribution to a possible revision of some of them. 

Deforestation and forest degradation remain high worldwide, and one of the dominant underlying causes for this forest loss is illegal logging. Numerous international policies have been developed aimed at addressing these issues. This article studies two of these regimes, the European Union's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) action plan and its Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with Ghana, and the climate mitigation policy of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). The interactions between these two international policies at the national level, namely in Ghana, are analyzed. The research shows numerous current and anticipated interactions between the two regimes. Most of these interactions potentially have a positive influence, but much depends on the future implementation of both regimes. The article makes recommendations on how to manage the interactions in order to improve the synergies and enhance effectiveness, including institutionalizing information sharing and learning, jurisdictional delimitation, and improving collaboration.

This special issue of the Forest Policy and Economics presents a series of articles that explore the question of whether the emerging timber verification programmes have a limited scope by focusing on principles and norms for the operation of the industrial forestry sector characterised by timber exploitation by forest business enterprises, or whether they contribute towards a gradual evolution of an innovative new policy assemblage that balances timber legality and forest livelihood requirements. It presents the results of several recent studies that investigated the characteristics of the FLEGT timber legality programmes and of artisanal timber production systems. The articles focus on the position of the timber legality policy within the global forest regime complex and on the role of community forest management and artisanal timber trade in timber legality. They highlight major issues that are of relevance when considering how concerns on timber legality and forest-based livelihoods can be related. The various articles emphasize the position of FLEGT in the global forest regime complex and how its implementation at national level results in the emergence of new policy assemblages for balancing of timber legality verification with livelihood interests. The articles demonstrate that notwithstanding difficulties in designing a global forest regime, at national level horizontal interaction between different forest regimes may well take place. At this level global forest policies obtain a country specific meaning and are further shaped by the routines and principles of national actors and embedded in national forest governance practices.