What should REDD+ achieve? –Sustainable communities and good forest governanceHenry Scheyvens (IGES)

I would like to speak my mind a little bit on this subject, focusing on the need to be moving
towards sustainable communities, in particular, as well as good forest governance.
I present the basic argument that I want to make, why we focus on communities and governance,
and then illustrate using Papua New Guinea. I have a short video as well that I would like to show
you near the end of my presentation.

The basic argument and hypothesis is whether we have REDD+ or we do not have REDD+, adevelopment priority for all developing countries must surely be that they want to move towards
sustainable rural communities. One way or another REDD+ is going to have to support thisprocess. This is vision of communities that live in harmony with the natural environment and areable to meet their developmental aspirations. Of course, we know why we have the REDD+
safeguards. Without those REDD+ policies could deny communities the opportunity to participate
in sustainable forest management leading to unsustainable conservation and development outcomes,
taking us away from sustainable communities. This is only going to happen through reform offorest governance to support more participatory forms of forest management and rural development.
We have seen these processes in developing countries of our region.

We heard about it inTanzania as well. Over the last 30 years or so, they move towards more participatory forms of184

forest management, and REDD+ needs to support this process.

Why focus on communities?

We know forests are very important for the local livelihoods.

About 1.6 billion people around the globe depending upon forest resource for their well-being.
Many of these people are amongst the poorest in developing countries. We know about 60 million
indigenous people are living within forests. We also have research that shows communities can begood forest managers. This is what governments are learning as well. When they have enoughfreedom to decide governance arrangements and when the benefits for them are greater than thecosts.
Governments have learned from mistakes with forest management. Where forest management has
been an exclusionary process, where rights have been given solely to concessioners or retained by
the state for protected area management and so forth, the communities have been excluded fromthis. We saw the high rates of deforestation that emerged in the late 1960s, 1970s. We have seena movement in countries, most countries not all countries in our region, to introduce laws to support
community forestry, and to introduce national programs backing these up. You can see someexample here. We heard Cambodia plans to put 2 million hectares under community-based forest
management yesterday.
management.

Indonesia has a couple of models of community-based forest

In 1995, in the Philippines, community-based forest management became theprimary program for forest management replacing the concession systems. Vietnam now has laws
in place that would support community-based forestry.
joint-forest management.

India, I am sure we are all familiar withIn Nepal, with the community forestry user groups, and about 30% offorests now under their management. Of course, the outcomes are not always perfect. There aresome problems and this program has to continue developing. The models need to evolve further.

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Why focus on governance?

Put simply, we know the countries with the highest rates ofdeforestation where REDD+ has greatest potential; other countries with the greatest challenges
facing the governance in their forest sectors. Just to quote one figure, 80% of countries preparing
for REDD+ selected by the FCPF160 and UN-REDD rank in the bottom half of the World Bank
Survey of Governance in 212 countries. This is using indicators on control of corruption, voice
and accountability. I am just quoting from somebody else’s work. But we realize this is a major
issue. We understand why transparent governance is part of the safeguards. We see the risks if
REDD+ is implemented in a state of weak governance. There risks of financial mismanagement,manipulation of weaker forest stakeholders.
If I can quote a senior official from the Forestry Authority in Papua New Guinea, he said, “One ofthe developers in our country is poisoning the minds of the people and making false promises andso forth, and it becomes very hard once that has happened for genuine developers to go and to workwith local communities.”

Circumvention of stakeholder consultation processes could be aproblem. We had seen the emergence of multi-stakeholder processes in the forest sector in a smallway. We see it in terms of forest certification, development of the legality standard in Indonesia
and so forth. We need to ensure that these processes are central to the development of REDD+
readiness and design. We can foresee other problems.

Let me move onto PNG161. We heard 90% of the land is held under systems of customary tenure.
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Forest Carbon Partnership Facility: http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/

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Papua New Guinea.

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It is owned by the people, and that is protected by the constitution of the country.

It means all theforest resources, nearly all, are owned by the people. We know that communities have a very
intimate relationship with forest; 80% of the population is still living in something like villages.
Forests are very important for the nutrition, construction materials, fuel, cultural activities and soforth. There are problems of governance in PNG. I do not want to dwell on this too muchbecause this is well known and also there are efforts underway in PNG to overcome these issues.
There are people working very hard within government, outside of government, and even within
industry we see a movement amongst a few of the industry towards certification of the operations
against international standards.

But just to give a sense of the challenges that PNG faces. Let me quote from the ITTO Diagnostic
Mission Report of 2007. There is a problem with the compliance of the government itself with thelaws of PNG when deciding to designate a forest area for logging purposes; negotiating agreementwith the landowners; landowners here means the indigenous people who own the land; enforcing
agreements, extending the current agreements and so forth.

What is really striking as well in Papua New Guinea is the development paradigm. You see theevidence of this in the news. Development is something that comes from the outside. It issomething that people elected to power bring back to the communities.

It is an exogenous process.

It is not endogenous. It is not coming from within the communities.

It is not something thatcommunities are doing for themselves.

People get elected to power.

They bring backdevelopment in the form of a logging project, in the form of a mining project, in the form of oil187

palm project. That is how development takes place. Communities are to receive the benefits.
The state has to acquire the rights from the communities to do those, and there are legal processes
for this. As I mentioned, communities get benefits in terms of royalties and so forth. That is akind of thinking about how development should take place. There is no government support for
local communities to manage the forests. For me, that is something very striking. If we look atother countries, we look at Indonesia, we look at Nepal with this community forestry user groups,
joint forest management in India, and what we have in Cambodia and elsewhere. In a country
such as PNG, nearly all the forests are actually owned by the people. There is actually noeffective implementation of policy to support and to manage the forests.

What is the outcome of this weak governance and dominance paradigm?

One is unsustainable

logging. I mentioned there are initiatives to improve logging by some of the operators in PNG, sowe need to have a balanced perspective here, but if we look at the reports we have, few sustainable
forestry project, poor logging practices, few lasting benefits for the local communities.
Large-scale conversion for commercial agriculture has become a problem. This is part of what wecall a new global land grab. In 2008, you may remember there was a spike in global food prices.
Since that period, there has been a dramatic increase in foreign direct investment into Sub-SaharanAfrica and other countries to acquire land to produce food and energy crops. Investment iscoming from the EU, US, even the Middle-East, and Papua New Guinea has been caught up in thisprocess as well.

We see roughly 5 million hectares have now moved into the control ofagricultural developers through what are known is special purpose business leases. This has been
in a very short period of time. There are some concerns that the intention of the developers is to get
this land for logging, not so much for agricultural development. Then, there are questions when acommunity gives over the rights to its land for 99 years under a lease what kind of benefits it mightreceive. There are some concerns with the governance of this whole process, but it is very hardfor people who are researching this topic to get good data to come to some hard conclusions. But
we can see concerns about sustainability, concerns about the governance.

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Just to give some figures in 2003, under these lease-leaseback arrangements only a 11,000 hectares
in Papua New Guinea. Now, we are looking at just under 5 million hectares and that is a period of
7 years. If you are a developer, you have the rights under one of these leases. You then apply tothe forestry authority to a get clearance to clear any forest on that land. If you are granted anauthority, you can go ahead and do that. There are applications now for clearance of forests,according to the figures we have of 1.3 million hectares.

Again, we have to say is this going totake us towards sustainable communities.

How do we get to sustainable communities?
REDD+ make a contribution to this?
obviously.

How do we get to climate change?

How does

I just present three ideas to you. Many things are needed

I will talk about FPIC 162 , participatory land use mapping, and roles andresponsibilities for communities in REDD+.

162 Free, Prior Informed Consent.

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FPIC is not mentioned explicitly in the REDD+ safeguards, but essentially we can consider it under
the safeguards, which refers to international conventions, and we find this concept under thoseconventions. It is the idea that local communities should give the Free, Prior and Informed
Consent to any development that impacts them.

This would include REDD+ before thatdevelopment takes place. Under the dominant forestry paradigm, that I have tried to describe inPNG, there is a process for gaining consent from the resource owners, the people, before they giveover the rights to the state to log the forests. But there are major concerns with implementing thisprocess properly.
What we have now is the development of FPIC Guidelines by the Office of Climate Change andDevelopment in Papua New Guinea. They now want to field test these and they are going to befield tested, I understand, in the April Salumei demonstration project. The Forestry Authority, thetop people there are telling us, they think these guidelines are going to be too tough, but it is an
important process for Papua New Guinea to go through to improve consultation, awareness withthe communities, and if we can get good FPIC for REDD+ that can have lot of benefits to otherforms of conservation or development intervention.

Participatory land use planning. We heard about this in Tanzania. In Papua New Guinea, there isno national land use plan, but we do have a small number of NGOs doing some groundbreaking
work with communities, to have the communities put some controls on their own land use. Theygo through a process of participatory mapping where they demarcate the boundaries of their land,
and they will assign some land for conservation of the forests, some of agriculture, for settlement
and so forth. Then, you have a kind of cultural event to institutionalize this within the community.
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In the case where the communities still have the rights for the forests, this could be the first step inany kind of REDD+ initiative. It needs more research. We need to know how effective this is,but it does show promise.

Roles and responsibilities of communities in REDD+; if REDD+ is to move us towards sustainablecommunities, do we want REDD+ to be simply paying communities for doing nothing, which iswhat we are getting with the logging projects, and which is what we will be getting with theagricultural development projects as well. When we have those, when there is no building of thecapacity of communities, no institution building, no roles, responsibilities and no assignment ofbenefits for actually doing something, what we have in terms of the use of money that goes to thecommunities is spending by men on consumables, and very few sustainable benefits.
I just want to show you this video, just to give you the background to it. IGES has a project infive countries where we are working with our partners to engage local communities andestablishing sample plots, testing an approach to build the capacity of those communities tomeasure the forests, so we can estimate timber volume and recovery of forests after harvesting aswell as carbon stock. Very much a participatory approach that we feel could be incorporated into
sub-national REDD+ implementation. This video was taken last week over 5 days. We went,myself, Fujisaki-san from IGES, and people from the Foundation for People and Community
Development, the foresters who we are working with went to one community on the Ramu River.
We spent 4 days with them and took them through this process.

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