Resources

Key documents

• ODI Opinions 26 by Adrian Wells and David Brown: Illegal logging: who gains from tighter controls?
• ODI Opinions 13 by David Brown and Kojo Amanor: Decentralising environmental management - beyond the crisis narrative
• ODI Forestry Briefing 1 - Forestry as an Entry Point for Governance Reform, April, 2002.

The illegal harvesting of timber and forest products in tropical countries has a detrimental impact on the environment and forest-dwelling communities, and causes a significant loss of public revenues. Tacking illegality in the forest sector has become increasingly important concern in recent years, with governments and civil society groups in tropical timber-producing countries making efforts to stem the illegal timber trade. Growing pressure comes too from timber-consuming nations, where proof of legal production is increasingly important before wood products can be sold on import markets. The EU Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT), for example, invites partner nations to sign agreements to safeguard access to European timber markets.

Developing systems that can ensure timber is from legal sources - i.e. systems that ensure the legality of a piece of wood, is therefore a priority for timber-producing and timber-consuming countries alike. This requires an effective and independent system of verification, with the confidence of a wide variety of stakeholders and the public at large.

What is a verification system?
Verification systems are broad and multi-layered processes of investigation and validation. They have been defined as:

• ‘A process covering the entire set of measures aimed at enabling the parties to an agreement to establish that the conduct of other parties is not incompatible with the obligations they have assumed under that agreement.’ [Sur, 1991]

Verification systems areimportant because they concerns a critical interface in public accountability. Verification straddles:

• Systems of internal accountability within governments;
• Accountability of the forest industry to the host government;
• National accountability of governments to their peoples, particularly to the forest-dependent poor and powerless;
• Accountability of governments to their development partners over the use of aid flows and development finance;
• International accountability, in relation to the global public goods dimensions of forests.

It is important to understand the differences and convergences between certification and verification. These are outlined on the Links to certification page.

Current verification systems
There are already examples of verification systems in place in many countries with tropical forests, and in other sectors (for example for food and diamonds). The Country and Sector Case Studies researched by VERIFOR reveal that these systems are not yet independent and effective systems, benefitting from stakeholder and public confidence. For this reason, developing a range of options for decision-makers to consider in the future is increasingly important.

One important component of effective verification that has had a very high-profile and been the subject of much research is independent forest monitoring, a set of activities undertaken by third parties (NGO or private sector) on behalf of the state, to monitor official processes of resource utilisation and assessment. Some of the key resources on this subject have been compiled by VERIFOR into the Independent Forest Monitoring Bibliography. This has provided a useful background for much of the work carried out by VERIFOR to date, as have some of the resources outlined in the box to the right.