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Impact story: How forest governance research may affect forest policymaking
Over the coming year, FNP will publish several impact stories, which will highlight how the research of our group made a positive impact on society. We kick off with a story about the work of Prof. Bas Arts on forest governance. While forest policy used to be a technocratic exercise, it is these days ever more acknowledged that the involvement of people is crucial for the successful sustainable use, management and conservation of forests. This article shows in which ways Arts contributed to that process, while also highlighting some of the ways in which Arts' expertise found its way into forest policies.
Many forest policies have a strong ecological or management focus and are particularly influenced by technical experts. The field of forest governance, however, has shown that it is essential to acknowledge and study the human dimension to make sure that policies will perform. For example, it is essential to guarantee that there is societal support for policymaking (political legitimacy); to acknowledge the needs and aspirations of people in relation to nature protection and forest management (environmental justice); and to mobilize local knowledge for successful conservation and sustainable use initiatives (policy effectiveness).
Bas Arts, currently personal professor, and former chair holder of the Forest & Nature Conservation Group at Wageningen University, has been studying transboundary forest-related issues from a social sciences’ perspective for two decades, particularly policy and governance studies. Arts’ research has been influential in developing the field of forest governance, thereby indirectly impacting policy-making on both forests and the people dependent on them.
The interplay between global policies and local people
Arts is particularly interested in the so-called global-local nexus: how global discourses and policies affect local practices, and the other way around. For example, Arts has been an important scholar in the field of Community Forest Management (CFM), which emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to large-scale commercial forestry. CFM is based on local indigenous forest management traditions on the one hand, and global participatory development approaches on the other. While CFM was not well-studied at that time, long-term research by Arts and his colleagues has shown that global forest policies such as CFM can actually make a difference on the ground and have the potential to bring benefits to both people and forests - even in cases where these policies are voluntary in nature and not written in binding law. Over the years, more countries adopted CFM as a prominent element of their forest policy (from Nepal to Bolivia to Ethiopia). Today, about 700 million hectares of forests (nearly 18% of the world's forests) are managed and/or owned by local and indigenous communities.
Due to its large-scale and complex nature, the impact of governance research on forest policy-making can be hard to pinpoint. Over the years, however, it has been acknowledged more and more that forest policy is not just a technocratic exercise, but that the involvement of people is crucial for the successful sustainable use, management and conservation of forests. In this ‘socialisation’ process of policy, Arts has had a voice through his work in the forest-policy interface. One example is his involvement in the global panel of experts of IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organisations). By contributing to the 2010 and 2024 IUFRO report on international forest governance, Arts has helped to put societal themes around forests, such as CFM and participation, empowerment and environmental justice, on the agenda of global biodiversity, climate change, and forest trade policies. The 2024 IUFRO report was recently presented at the UN Forum on Forests and will soon be presented to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International Tropical Timber Organization. It also drew much attention from international media, such as the Financial Times, the Guardian, BBC and the scientific top-journal Nature.
Including the human factor in national nature protection
Arts’ impact is also expressed through the forest-policy interface on a national level. In 2013, for example, he was member of an advisory board of the Dutch Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Rli), which assessed the state-of-the-art of Dutch nature policy at that time. Its report substantially influenced the Governmental Vision on Nature in 2014. Research focused on governance by Arts and others found its way into the governmental vision on nature
protection, which now – much more than before – incorporates a governance
approach. Responsibility of nature protection shifted from the central
government to sub-national governments; stakeholders were invited to
participate. Also, the importance of the roles and preferences of people about
nature was now acknowledged, strengthening the shift from a pure ecological
perspective on nature protection to one that takes human-nature relationships
into account.
Another example is from 2018. According to one of the lead authors of the Dutch forest strategy (Bossenstrategie), Arts and FNP-colleagues played a substantive role in including relational values as a strong rationale and legitimation of the forest strategy. Relational values point to the experience and meaning of nature for people. It has become one of the first nature-related Dutch policy documents in which this notion of relational values is considered one of the fundamental building blocks of the policy (besides instrumental and intrinsic values of nature).
On the one hand, Arts has critically assessed the effectiveness of policies, while on the other, his expertise has been used for new policies. These examples show how research can influence policy-making and thereby have a positive impact on society.