Photo by flickr/carf

Resources

Key documents

• VERIFOR Briefing Paper 3 - Developmental Impacts of Verification Systems in the Forest Sector (PDF, 431kb)
• Presentation to VERIFOR Experts Meeting on Developmental Impacts, April 2006 (PDF, 155kb)

See also

• ODI Natural Resource Perspective 75- From supervising 'subjects' to supporting 'citizens': Recent developments in community forestry in Asia and Africa, February 2002
• Rural livelihoods, forest law and the illegal timber trade in Honduras and Nicaragua
  A. Wells, F. Del Gatto, M. Richards, D. Pommier & A. Contreras-Hermosilla, Paper in the series 'Forest law enforcement and rural livelihoods, CIFOR, Bogor, 2004.
• Reflections on the Social Dimensions of Verification in FLEGT processes
  Thinkpiece by Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme (PDF, 144kb)

In the many debates on illegal logging, little has been heard on the likely impact that proposed reforms to tackle illegality may have on the lives of the rural poor. In fact, there has been very little experience of formal impact assessment of forest sector verification systems to date. Developmental impacts – the way that verification systems influence the economic outcomes for small-scale operators and forest-dependent people – appear to be particularly poorly understood. This is because:

• Many of the verification systems are fairly recent and their developmental impact is, as yet, undetermined;
• Impact assessment is complex and requires resources;
• Attribution of impacts to the verification system is not always clear;
• In cases of low ownership (i.e. where verification
  systems have been externally imposed), there may be little interest in assessing impact.

VERIFOR is examining the developmental impacts of verification systems within the forest sector, looking at both the direct impacts of the verification process itself, as well as those indirect impacts arising from the implementation of verification. Such impacts are clearly influenced by the policy and legal framework, the initial design of the verification system and the way in which verification is carried out.

VERIFOR aims to identify a range of measures that can be adopted to minimise negative impacts, also looking at issues surrounding the monitoring and evaluation of verification systems.

Key areas of debate
- see resources for full discussion

• Reconciling the interests of all stakeholders, in ways that allow for clear and unambiguous objectives to be set.
• Considering the nature of the likely developmental impacts of a verification system and how these can be assessed so there is some degree of confidence over attribution.
• Distinguishing which developmental impacts are due to the verification system, and which are due to the legal framework on which it is based.