State Failure, Corruption, and Warfare: Challenges for Forest Policy

ABSTRACT Forest policies are failing in large areas of the world. In too many nations, forest area is declining, timber revenues are not capturing actual economic values, management plans—where they exist at all—are ignored, and ecologically significant areas are being degraded. In many places, public lands and even national parks cannot be protected against encroachment. Bitter local controversies over forest tenure and use rights persist. In many places, the underlying preconditions for sustainability do not exist in the face of state weakness and failure, corruption, and war. States generally recognized as failed or fragile encompass 15% of the world's forest. A cross tab of forest area (2005) against the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index shows that nearly half of the world's forest is in nations with what TI calls “rampant” corruption. This includes several major nations with extensive forests and important biodiversity hotspots. An encouraging upsurge of willingness to face this issue has occurred in the development community. But uprooting corruption and fixing state failure is easier said than done. Considering this fact, the outlook for more than half of the world's forest area—important to indigenous and forest-dependent people, and containing critical reserves of biodiversity—is grim.