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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 POLICY
The trends in forest policy development worldwide since UNCED have been:
-
decentralisation of decision-making, often accompanied by devolution of
responsibility
-
provision for community involvement in forestry,
-
privatisation especially of plantations -
involvement of the public in policy
development
Decentralisation is a feature of the forest administration in several Commonwealth countries;
India, for example, decentralised control of forest resources to State level many years ago, as
has Australia (to the States), Canada (to the Provinces), Malaysia and Nigeria (to the States)
and, more recently, the UK (to Scotland, Wales and England). Details of these countries and
others are in the Country Forestry Profiles. Generally the national body is responsible for the
development of national forest policy and the enforcement of national laws related to forests
(including conservation and protection) and forest products, for representation at international
level, and for relations with other countries. But the division of responsibilities is not always
clear and, furthermore, provinces or states may have their own development policies and
priorities, so that tensions may arise between federal and state levels and coordination
presents a challenge. Malaysia, for example, has a National Forestry Council, responsible for
promoting collaboration in the implementation of national forest policy.
Control has been devolved further to the level of communities in several countries, including
Canada, Ghana, India, Uganda and the UK. The people’s involvement in forest management
has already been described in Chapter 2, but since much of the forest estate in
Commonwealth countries is publicly-owned (see Chapter 1) there has been a strong move to
public participation in the process of forest policy development as well, in line with the trend in
the 1990s towards more participatory democracy. In Canada the process of public
participation in forestry decision-making, including policy development, has been encouraged
for some time (see for example, Duinker 1998) while Coates and Fenton (1999) describe the
uses of social assessment to incorporate social issues in policy development and the
Australian Regional Forest Agreements. But public participation has not been confined to
countries with developed economies; Wyatt et al.. (1999) for example describe the creation of
a local consultation process for stakeholder involvement in forest policy involvement in Vanuatu.
The UK Forestry Commission carries out regular surveys of public opinion on forestry matters;
the latest, in 2005, showed that 89% of respondents selected at least one public benefit as a
good reason to support forestry with public money. As in previous years the four top reasons to
support forestry were to provide places for wildlife to live, to provide places to visit and walk in,
to help prevent the ‘greenhouse effect’ and global warming, and to improve the countryside
landscape (see http://www.forestry.gov.uk/statistics
).
Privatisation of forest resources has gone furthest in New Zealand and the UK, catalysed by
the free-market philosophy of the 1980s. In New Zealand the first phase was to “corporatise”
the commercial functions of the New Zealand Forest Service, i.e. to transfer these functions to
a state-run enterprise. Between 1990 and 1992 the government moved to privatise much of the
forest resource, and sold more than 350 000 ha of planted forests to the private sector. An
additional 188 000 ha of government-owned forests were sold in 1996. The Maori people have,
however, made claims on ownership of most forests on the North Island and all forests on the
South Island since the right of New Zealand’s indigenous people to claim land that is rightfully
theirs is preserved in legislation. The process of resolving these claims has been slow (Clarke
1999).
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