Participatory Forest Management towards Climate Governance: Frontiers and Challenges

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land–Climate Interactions".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 3862

Special Issue Editors

Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan
Interests: forest policy; community based forest management; political ecology; forest governance; Southeast Asia
Institute of International Forestry and Forest Products, Technische Universität Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany
Interests: forest and climate development policy; governance of forest and climate change; bureaucratic politics; power and interests of development actors; public administration and development; qualitative analysis; South Asia
Department of Forest and Nature Conservation Policy, University of Goettingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
Interests: local, national, regional and global forest governance; bureaucratic politics; actor power analysis in the forest politics; qualitative and quantitative (e.g., QCA) methods; climate governance

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Forest-related sustainable land use practices present significant opportunities for reducing global carbon emissions. Forest conservation and sustainable management can create benefits or co-benefits for climate change adaptation. The international forest related climate regimes, such as, REDD+ of UNFCCC and UNFF put greater emphasis on practicing sustainable forest management for gaining a wider range of climate change adaptation and mitigation benefits. Participatory forest management, which is synonymous with community/collaborative/joint/collective/social forest management, has already become a popular concept for extending social, economic and environmental services. In this regard, it is particularly important to understand how various instruments of participatory forestry contribute to the governance of global climate change adaptation and mitigation. Consequently, it would be interesting to investigate the policy, politics and practices spanning international to local perspectives. For forest management and climate governance to be meaningful, any short- and long-term technical, cultural, political, economic and ecological limits of understanding and challenges must be explored, evaluated and addressed.

The Special Issue focuses on determining how various factors and elements of participatory forest practices set the limit and direction for governance of climate policy. Additionally, what factors act on limiting the synergies, and what should be the practical strategies for addressing such challenges in order to bring transformative changes.

Dr. Hyakumura Kimihiko
Dr. Md. Saifur Rahman
Guest Editors

Dr. Pradip Kumar Sarker
Co-Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • participatory forestry
  • climate governance
  • REDD+
  • indigenous community
  • climate adaptation and mitigation
  • sustainable forest management
  • national and international policy
  • institutions
  • multilevel actors
  • qualitative and quantitative analysis

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 2573 KiB  
Article
Joining Policy Forums Together to Develop Ki-no-Eki, a Community Currency System for Forest Management in Japan: Dynamics of Policy Communication Networks
by Hiromi Nakazato, Rui Izumi and Seunghoo Lim
Land 2022, 11(10), 1811; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/land11101811 - 16 Oct 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1555
Abstract
In some mountainous areas of Japan, the Ki-no-Eki system, in which wood is collected to thin the forest and is exchanged for community currency, has been specifically designed and implemented as a solution to current and emerging forest governance issues. This study aimed [...] Read more.
In some mountainous areas of Japan, the Ki-no-Eki system, in which wood is collected to thin the forest and is exchanged for community currency, has been specifically designed and implemented as a solution to current and emerging forest governance issues. This study aimed to capture the evolutionary processes of a complete communication network consisting of organizations that joined policy forums to help develop the Ki-no-Eki system. A total of 26 policy forums were held from 2011 to 2019 to discuss the adoption and implementation of the Ki-no-Eki system across Japan, and coattendance and the resultant policy discourses among 62 participating Ki-no-Eki organizations in these forums were regarded as dynamic communication network processes. We analyzed how policy communication networks formed and evolved to understand the underlying network dynamics driven by not only endogenous network processes—bonding and bridging social capital—but also exogenous effects defined by actors’ attributes. We employed the stochastic actor-oriented model for network dynamics to manage the collected longitudinal undirected network data. We found (i) the emergence of bonding social capital and (ii) homophilic and heterophilic connections in communication networks, which provided insightful explanations of the driving forces of social cohesion among Ki-no-Eki organizations engaged in forest management in Japan. Full article
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13 pages, 2148 KiB  
Article
Species Composition Affects the Accuracy of Stand-Level Biomass Models in Hemiboreal Forests
by Jānis Liepiņš, Andis Lazdiņš, Santa Kalēja and Kaspars Liepiņš
Land 2022, 11(7), 1108; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/land11071108 - 19 Jul 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1478
Abstract
Various tree species contribute differently to total biomass stock, making the development of species-specific stand-level equations critical for better estimation of forest biomass and quantification of carbon stocks. Previously derived dry weight biomass models did not assess the effect of dominant species composition [...] Read more.
Various tree species contribute differently to total biomass stock, making the development of species-specific stand-level equations critical for better estimation of forest biomass and quantification of carbon stocks. Previously derived dry weight biomass models did not assess the effect of dominant species composition according to stand growing stock. Growing stock definitions and forest species composition differ by country, justifying the need for national stand-level biomass equations. We explored the relationship between growing stock volume and stand biomass density of above- and below-ground components in six common forest categories in Latvia using plot-level data from the National Forest Inventory from 2016 to 2020. Additionally, we explored model dependence on region, forest type, and species composition index. Models that considered growing stock and dominant species composition index performed better than models with growing stock as the only variable, especially for heterogeneous deciduous forests with greater species diversity. The elaborated models are a useful alternative to individual-level assessment for estimating forest biomass stocks in circumstances where individual tree data are not available. Full article
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