Search Results (18)

The circular economy (CE) has emerged as an innovative response to the challenges of economic growth and environmental protection. This study aims to establish a portrait of the circular economy within the wood forestry sector in Benin. The methodology includes field surveys through structured interviews in the southern and northern zones and a documentary analysis. Data were collected from direct and political stakeholders to assess their knowledge and practices. A discourse analysis, focusing on internal factors, was used to understand and analyze the motivations of local actors in the use of CE strategies. The results show that the most used strategies are maintenance and repair (52.38%), followed by donation and resale (18%). The motivations mentioned by the actors in the two zones are mainly economic (improving income and limiting expenses) and social (esthetic). However, if most of the actors do not perceive limits to these strategies, others highlight certain weaknesses, including the long process of transforming used goods (19.69%) and the loss of quality of recycled materials (15.44%). To address these weaknesses, alternative strategies, such as eco-design, optimization of operations, loan-exchange, and industrial ecology, are proposed. Full article

This study examines the impact of EU agricultural expenditures on renewable energy production and energy efficiency in the agricultural sector across nine Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries over the period 2015–2022. The analysis is based on a panel dataset compiled from European Commission databases, incorporating annual expenditures under five Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) priorities, as well as indicators of renewable energy production and direct energy consumption in agriculture and forestry. Using panel regression models, the study assesses how different CAP funding priorities influence energy sustainability outcomes. The findings indicate that certain funding priorities significantly contribute to renewable energy adoption, while others have a limited effect, emphasizing the need for a more targeted policy approach. The results also highlight regional disparities in the effectiveness of CAP funding, suggesting that farm structure, institutional capacity, and climate conditions mediate the impact of EU expenditures on energy sustainability. These insights contribute to the ongoing discourse on optimizing EU funding mechanisms to support a sustainable agricultural transition in the CEE region. Full article

As the world’s largest ecosystem, forests affect the location, layout, and functionality of human populations worldwide. Despite environmental efforts, forests are being taken down. As socioeconomic issues promote deforestation, sustainable development is a worldwide answer. However, there is still a shortage of information about the manifestation and interconnection of sustainability aspects in a country’s forestry and their impact on policy making in developing nations. To address this knowledge gap, this study analyzes the preeminent discourse of forest cover in Vietnam forestry and determines how well it incorporates the three pillars of sustainable development. The various pieces of pertinent material (forestry regulations, reports, articles, statements by government officials and National Assembly representatives in the media, etc.) were analyzed using discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Overall, the findings show that the discourse has evolved through four themes: intercropped supporting trees, multi-purposed trees, replacing afforestation and change from forest cover to tree cover. These themes all exclude ecosystems that must exist beneath forest cover, which is frequently disrupted by the clear cut of fast-growing trees and industrial crops. The institutionalization of the discourse is facilitating legal deforestation by converting natural forest into other land uses, in particular infrastructure with replacing afforestation. The economic coalition, which strategically includes livelihood and social development in their storylines to legitimize forest conversion to other land uses, is winning the discursive struggle for hegemony. The paper concludes with some recommendations to improve Vietnam’s forestry policy, making for long-term sustainable development. Full article

Decentralized forest management is criticized for not involving women in decision-making. The study explores what the introduction of affirmative policy in community forestry committees means for the participation of women in decision making in four cases in the middle hills of Nepal. The qualitative analysis of interviews and observations draws on feminist political ecology, a women’s participation typology, the critical mass theory and gender justice. The findings centre on the importance of electoral procedures, the role of authorities, the role of the familial context and whether and how women internalized and contested patriarchal norms. The women’s quota was found to have had as yet little impact on substantive participation, yet the enhanced exposure of female committee members to the discrepancy between the gender equality discourse introduced in community forestry and the persistent male domination seemed to create, in a few women performing as critical actors, an enhanced awareness of male suppression; an awareness that is a prerequisite for contestation of those patriarchal norms denying women access to power over forest and, generally speaking, of gender injustice. This research reports examples of women, brought in the executive committees by the studied affirmative policies, successfully contesting traditional gender roles and gender injustice, negotiating for them and for the other women, a more effective and meaningful participation in the management of Community Forests. Full article

Rapid growth of environmental problems, economic volatilities, and social changes have increased the scopes of adopting environmentally friendly and resilient production systems. Regenerative farming and forestry practices are such systems appropriate for mountain communities in Nepal. They had performed better with indigenous resources, institutions, and social-ecological systems. Unfortunately, the assets have been degraded to extinction, mainly commencing works of national and international development agencies. Consequently, regenerative practices are disappearing. Despite appeals and commitments, the degradations of the assets are not halted and reversed. This study used secondary sources of data and work experiences and explained the working faults of the external agencies involved in the agriculture, forestry, and wildlife sectors. It elucidated that most regenerative practices had sustained well in forest and farm resource-integrated production systems and a modest degree of natural and human inputs and production environments. The production environments degraded when the government agencies provided foreign agencies opportunities to be involved actively in policy formulation and implementation of agriculture and forestry-related sectors. The foreign agencies meddled in the national policies and community practices and modified the production environments for their interests and benefits. They intervened in policies and local communities to practice a farming system based on extremely human-made and imported inputs and institutions and to manage forest-related resources in extremely intact natural systems. In the policy discourses and decisions, the farming inputs, practices, and institutions popularly practiced in developed countries are considered superior whereas the indigenous ones are considered inferior. Agricultural plans and policies have overvalued flash yield or other direct returned and undervalued environmental friendliness, indirect economic benefits, and social advantages to prioritize support of the government and other agencies. The introduced farming inputs and institutions displaced or hampered the indigenous ones. The foreign agencies also meddled in forest policies and practices of the country to address environmental and economic problems of developed countries which resulted in adverse impacts on the indigenous assets. They intervened in the resource management policies with financial and technical inputs to destroy some of the assets and make the forest-related resource management that results in better benefits (offsetting GHG emission, enhancing tranquility and serenity of recreational sites, and potentially expanding agricultural markets) to the people of developed countries. This study has explained how the officials and experts of both government and foreign agencies abused and misused some strategic tactics and overused, poorly used and disused, others in their work process to address their self-centered interests and problems. In essence, intentional destructive interventions of the policy and development agencies have resulted in degradation to the extinction of the indigenous assets in the communities. Full article

Community-based conservation is advocated as an idea that long-term conservation success requires engaging with, providing benefits for, and establishing institutions representing local communities. However, community-based conservation’s efficacy and impact in sustainable resource management varies depending on national natural resource policies and implications for local institutional arrangements. This paper analyses the significance of natural resource management policies and institutional design on the management of common pool resources (CPRs), by comparing Namibian conservancies and community forests. To meet this aim, we reviewed key national policies pertinent to natural resource governance and conducted 28 semi-structured interviews between 2012 and 2013. Key informants included conservancy and community forest staff and committee members, village headmen, NGO coordinators, regional foresters, wildlife officials (wardens), and senior government officials in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry. We explored the following questions: how do national natural resource management policies affect the operations of local common pool resource institutions? and how do external factors affect local institutions and community participation in CPRs decision-making? Our results show that a diversity of national policies significantly influenced local institutional arrangements. Formation of conservancies and community forests by communities is not only directly linked with state policies designed to increase wildlife numbers and promote forest growth or improve condition, but also formulated primarily for benefits from and control over natural resources. The often-assumed direct relationship between national policies and local institutional arrangements does not always hold in practice, resulting in institutional mismatch. We aim to advance theoretical and applied discourse on common pool resource governance in social-ecological systems, with implications for sustainable land management policies in Namibia and other landscapes across sub-Saharan Africa. Full article

For the past decade, the land rush discourse has analyzed foreign investment in land and agriculture around the world, with Africa being a continent of particular focus due to the scale of acquisitions that have taken place. Gabon, a largely forested state in Central Africa, has been neglected in the land rush conversations, despite having over half of its land allocated to forestry, agriculture, and mining concessions. This paper draws on existing evidence and contributes new empirical data through expert interviews to fill this critical knowledge gap. We situate Gabon’s historic relationship with land, establishing the intrinsic relationship between colonial land tenure systems and present-day land rights. Our findings analyze the macro context of investors and investments, as well as the impacts related to rural–urban linkages and infrastructure development into the forests, civil society, human–environment relationships, and certification programs. While challenges continue to be experienced, the promise of Gabon’s first national land use plan—the use of sustainable concessions and mandatory forestry certification—offers a unique opportunity for Gabon to transition towards a future that better benefits its population while also protecting its natural resources. Full article

The current COVID-19 global pandemic has amplified the pressure on the agriculture sector, inciting the need for sustainable agriculture more than ever. Thus, in this review, a sustainable perspective of the use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) or drone technology in the agriculture sector is discussed. Similarly, the types of cameras (multispectral, thermal, and visible), sensors, software, and platforms frequently deployed for ensuring precision agriculture for crop monitoring, disease detection, or even yield estimation are briefly discoursed. In this regard, vegetation indices (VIs) embrace an imperative prominence as they provide vital information for crop monitoring and decision-making, thus a summary of most commonly used VIs is also furnished and serves as a guide while planning to collect specific crop data. Furthermore, the establishment of significant applications of RPAs in livestock, forestry, crop monitoring, disease surveillance, irrigation, soil analysis, fertilization, crop harvest, weed management, mechanical pollination, crop insurance and tree plantation are cited in the light of currently available literature in this domain. RPA technology efficiency, cost and limitations are also considered based on the previous studies that may help to devise policies, technology adoption, investment, and research activities in this sphere. Full article

The topic of large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) has attracted wide interest in the literature and the media. However, there is little work on the gendered institutional changes and gendered impacts on common pool resources (CPR) due to LSLA. The aim of this paper is to address these impacts. This is done by discussing data from participatory research (using the methods of participatory observation, semi-structured and narrative interviews, biographies, focus group discussions, value chain analysis, and household questionnaires) on a forestry plantation operated by the British investor, the New Forests Company (NFC) in the Kilolo district, in the Iringa region. The institutional arrangements regarding different land-related common pool resources from pre-colonial times until the arrival of this investment will be shown. Furthermore, how these arrangements have changed over time and since the LSLA is presented. Then, the effects on men’s and women’s access to CPR and, thus, the impacts on their capacities to perform their reproductive work and resilience will be addressed. Furthermore, the paper focuses on how different stakeholders in the land deal (the investor, the government, different local people) make use of these different institutions to push through their own interests regarding the land. Finally, the paper looks at collective compensation payments (such as monetary compensation and jobs) and forms of corporate social responsibility (CSR) schemes, and how they are perceived emically. It is argued that the LSLA in this case clearly grabs land and land-related common pool resources that were previously held in common. Women, such as daughters, sisters, and wives, had specific access and property rights to these. Thus, the paper concludes that this grabbing lowers women’s resilience and deprives them of important resources for their livelihoods, and for food and cash production at critical times. CSR programmes and compensation rarely reach women and are, for them, an anti-politics machine, hiding the grabbing processes, and impacting the poorest of the poor, while the company uses a development discourse to legitimise its activities. In fact, the people perceive the investment as trapping them in underdevelopment. Full article

Agroforestry is an intensive land management system that integrates trees into land already used for crop and animal farming. This provides a diverse range of ecosystem services by bridging the gaps between agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry. It is an important approach to improve the environmental, economic, and social benefits of complex social–ecological systems in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper aims to examine the research trends in agroforestry and the current state of knowledge, as well as the research gaps in the ecosystem services of agroforestry in this region. A systematic mapping methodology was applied, where analysis units were academic articles related to agroforestry practices in the Asia-Pacific region. The articles published between 1970 and 2018 were collected through the international specialized academic database, SCOPUS. They were coded according to the types of agroforestry practices and ecosystem services. The research result indicates silvorable systems, especially plantation crop combinations, tree management, habitats for species, biological controls, and maintenance of genetic diversity and gene-pools, are the most prominent in the agroforestry research from the Asia-Pacific region. Approximately 60% of all research articles include case studies from India, China, Indonesia, and Australia. Research on agroforestry has changed following the international discourse on climate change and biodiversity. Therefore, this systematic map improves our understanding of the nature, volume, and characteristics of the research on ecosystem services with regard to agroforestry in the Asia-Pacific region. It provides scholars with a springboard for further meta-analysis or research on agroforestry and ecosystem services. Full article

This study (conducted as PhD research at Rhodes University, South Africa) describes a formative interventionist research project conducted to explore factors inhibiting improved wetland management within a corporate plantation forestry context and determine if, and how, expansive social learning processes could strengthen organizational learning and development to overcome these factors. A series of formative interventionist workshops and feedback meetings took place over three years; developing new knowledge amongst staff of Company X, and improved wetland management practices. Through the expansive learning process, the tensions and contradictions that emerged became generative, supporting expansive learning that was reflectively engaged with throughout the research period. The study was== supported by an epistemological framework of cultural historical activity theory and expansive learning. Realist social theory, emerging from critical realism, with its methodological compliment the morphogenetic framework gave the research the depth of detail required to explain how the expansive learning, organizational social change, and boundary crossings that are necessary for assembling the collective were taking place. This provided ontological depth to the research. The research found that expansive learning processes, which are also social learning processes (hence we use the term ‘expansive social learning’, supported organizational learning and development for improved wetland management. Five types of changes emerged from the research: (1) Changes in structure, (2) changes in practice, (3) changes in approach, (4) changes in discourse, and (5) changes in knowledge, values, and thinking. The study was able to explain how these changes occurred via the interaction of structural emergent properties and powers; cultural emergent properties and powers; and personal emergent properties and powers of agents. It was concluded that expansive learning could provide an environmental education platform to proactively work with the sociological potential of morphogenesis to bring about future change via an open-ended participatory and reflexive expansive learning process. Full article

Studies on the effectiveness of the discourse motivating the creation of protected areas (PAs) and their empirical reality are scarce. The lack of knowledge in this area affects programs and policies on the maintenance and creation of protected areas. Thus, we investigated this matter using the case study of the Nascente Geraizeiras Sustainable Development Reserve (NGSDR) in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The reserve comprises a transition area between Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest, two critical biomes in the world of biodiversity and the only two hotspots in Brazil. Changes in land use were identified over a period of 30 years, from 1987 to 2017, based on a compilation of the arguments associated with the creation of the PA, geographic information system (GIS) techniques, remote sensing (RS) data, and landscape ecology indices. Seven types of land use were identified using Random Forest classifier R software: native forest, silviculture, pasture, bare soil, rocky outcrop, watercourses, and agriculture. The overall mean accuracy of the classification was 90% for all five periods. The results demonstrated that the creation of protected areas is supported by contexts of land use still based on traditional. The case study showed the discourse served as a fundamental strategy in the beginning of the mobilization that culminated in the creation of the NGSDR, in the containment of forestry, in an increase in native forest areas, and in reduced fragmentation, leading to an improvement in the conservation status of the landscape. The present study encourages future researchers to apply the evaluated approach and demonstrates its potential in assessing the formulation of programs and policies on protected areas worldwide, providing valid indicators for the improvement of ecosystem services. Full article

Community forestry is required to follow a forest management plan (FMP) to ensure sustainable tree harvesting. However, the role of FMPs or forest bureaucrats’ discretion in guiding harvesting decisions and the resultant effects has not been explored. This paper investigates tree harvesting practices in community forests (CF) and its effects on forest sustainability, using the forest inventory panel dataset for three consecutive periods (2010, 2013 and 2016), together with qualitative information obtained by key informant interviews and a review of records of the community forest users’ group. Harvesting decisions in the CF are largely guided by the decrees or schematic instructions of forest bureaucrats, where the role of the FMP remains highly contested. Whether harvesting decisions should be guided by the prescriptions of the FMP or should be regulated through decrees is a matter of discourse. Forest bureaucrats are arbitrarily reducing harvesting quantities and rarely referring to the prescriptions of the FMP. Consequently, users are compelled to harvest less than half the quantity of trees prescribed in the FMP. Furthermore, they are only allowed to harvest poor quality and dead trees. As a result, the number of good quality trees has increased, while the number of seedlings and saplings has decreased significantly. Although harvesting of saplings and seedlings is a common practice, it is against the provisions of the FMP. Though the current bureaucratic discretion has shown quick short-term effects on the forest stand conditions, the long-term impacts should not be undermined. Our findings will be useful to implementors and policy makers in Nepal and other developing countries with similar circumstances for deciding the tree harvesting. We argue for a rational approach in designing harvesting prescriptions and complying with them rather than regulating harvesting practices through guidelines, circulars and bureaucratic discretion. Full article

Growing concern about forest degradation and loss, combined with the political impetus supplied by the Earth Summit in 1992, led to the establishment of eleven intergovernmental, regional, and international forest-related processes focused on the use of criteria and indicators (C&I) for sustainable forest management (SFM). Up to 171 countries have participated in these processes to apply C&I frameworks as a tool for data collection, monitoring, assessment, and reporting on SFM and on achieving various forest-related UN Sustainable Development Goals. Based on an expert survey and literature analysis we identify six interlinked impact domains of C&I efforts: (1) enhanced discourse and understanding of SFM; (2) shaped and focused engagement of science in SFM; (3) improved monitoring and reporting on SFM to facilitate transparency and evidence-based decision-making; (4) strengthened forest management practices; (5) facilitated assessment of progress towards SFM goals; and (6) improved forest-related dialog and communication. We conclude that the 25-year history of C&I work in forestry has had significant positive impacts, though challenges do remain for the implementation of C&I and progress towards SFM. The work should be continued and carried over to other sectors to advance sustainability goals more broadly. Full article

Forests and carbon sequestration have become fundamental themes in climate change mitigation. The idea of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) has generated significant interest in forest governance from United Nations (UN) climate strategies over the past decade. REDD+ was initially hailed as a smart and cost-effective way to mitigate climate change. As it is rolling out, ambiguities and controversies are increasingly surfacing to the stakeholders at different levels. Examining the forest governance of Nepal in detail, this research examines how relationships between national and local forest actors have changed, and how REDD+ discourses have evolved among them at the interface between global interests in carbon commodification on one hand, and local realities of community forestry on the other hand. To better understand these competing positions, the study uses a post-structural political ecology perspective with elements of discourse analysis. Using data from interviews with policy actors and members of three local community forest user groups, focus group discussions, policy event observations, and document reviews, this paper highlights how global forest carbon commodification has been affecting community forestry governance. It also illustrates different storylines that actors employ to influence policy discourse and REDD+ debates, indicating a considerable range of problem definitions and policy solutions of climate change among the actors. The analysis highlights the connection between power relationships and the evolution of discourses surrounding REDD+, and how an external discourse can reinforce or challenge local governance and the centralization of forest authority. As such, the research also offers a new application of discursive storylines to climate change discourse analysis across national and local scales. The findings emphasize the importance of a more open and transparent dialogue across Nepal’s forest governance and management levels to ensure actual benefits for healthy forests, strong communities, and effective climate change mitigation. Nepal's findings also suggest highly relevant lessons to other developing countries with significant community forest governance, and a strong planned focus on REDD+. Full article