Legal timber: verification and governance in the forest sector

Abstract

This book investigates a topical issue in international forest policy development: how to verify the legality of timber sold on regional and international markets in ways that will satisfy both the interests of producer states and the demands of consumers. This seemingly straightforward and technical matter is in fact complex and political. It addresses a critical interface in inter-governmental relations, where producer states’ rights of ownership are defended with considerable tenacity. While at one level the subject matter of this book is forest sector-specific, it touches on much broader issues about the balance between sovereign state control and the international stewardship of global public goods, illegality as a dimension of poor governance, and mechanisms of national and international public accountability. ed in this book, is a response to an important level of doubt over the functioning of the normal system of forest control, and involves two key aspects of ‘additionality’ to address this doubt: first, developing and implementing a set of additional measures to test and validate claims about legal compliance in the forest sector, and second, bringing in an additional set of actors from outside the forest sector, to help strengthen the credibility of these new measures and the accountability of those charged with implementing them. The overall conclusion that gradually emerges is that, to be effective in the situations that are typical of tropical producer states, the control of illegal logging cannot be addressed solely as a problem of criminality nor engineered entirely by external parties. It has, rather, to be positioned within a wider and well-embedded process of governance reform.