1.1 Multiple concerns about, perspectives of, and claims on forests and their management
1.2 The Economic, Political, and Demographic Landscapes in the Asia-Pacific Region
The value of forests as environmental, economic, and social resources for maintaining the integrity of natural systems and improving human welfare has long been recognized. Although forest landscapes have been subject to human modification throughout history, the pace, scale, and intensity of their transformation has increased significantly during the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the developing countries of the tropics. The accompanying environmental consequences of forest loss and degradation have intensified in parallel with the emergence of a distinct social movement that has since declared the defence of forests, forest-dependent populations, and forest wildlife as its mission. Today, this movement exists in various shades of political orientation and organizational sophistication. Its adherents operate at local, national and international levels, in collaboration with each other, governments, and increasingly, though still hesitatingly, the private sector.
The forests in the Asia-Pacific region, due to their crucial roles as homes to biological diversity and forest-dependent peoples, important functions in regulating local, regional and international climates, sources of timber and non-timber forest products necessary for societies inside and outside the region, as well as their comparatively quicker rate of loss and degradation, have represented a special area of interest for environmental organizations, some of which have been engaged in wildlife conservation activities for more than thirty years. Opposite such conservation organizations of primarily industrialized country origins are the local development organizations whose constituencies are both agents and victims of forest loss and degradation. Although their primary driving force is linked to the subsistence needs of the rural poor, environmental stewardship is of equally crucial significance since it is closely intertwined with the livelihoods of forest resource users. Situated between these two poles are a multitude of public, private, and civil society organizations, which address the different facets of the region's forests.
This report seeks to examine the perspectives of the different elements of the environmental movement on the current status and future trends of factors related to forestry in the Asia-Pacific region, to outline a vision for forestry based on consensus approaches to operationalizing sustainable forest management, and to propose alternative scenarios of the nature of the environmental movement's involvement in the complete, partial, and non-achievement, respectively, of the vision to the year 2010.
The world's forests are located at the intersection of an array of conflicting interests, the legitimacy of all of which needs to be recognized as a first step towards sustainable forest management (FAO, 1993). These interests emanate not solely from the forestry sector, but also from a variety of individuals and groups with a stake in seeing forest lands used for such other purposes as agriculture, urban development, or the construction of transportation or energy infrastructure. Interests also diverge widely amongst forest-related stakeholders, covering the entire spectre from complete protection for future generations to maximum utilization for immediate benefits, as well as institutions from public, private and non-governmental sectors. What is often referred to as the environmental movement neatly coincides with neither one specific perspective in forest-related issues nor with groups from a single sector. Rather, it is a dynamic ensemble of organizations, institutions, and individuals, elements of which associate both with each other and with elements outside the movement.
During the process of economic development, countries witness dramatic changes in the way their territories are utilized. The broad patterns of natural vegetation and land use, including cropland, permanent pasture, forests, urban land, and wasteland, generally evolve as the balance between their underlying driving and controlling forces changes. (Grainger, 1995). Even though each country's land uses evolve in a distinct way, certain unique long-term trends are discernible. They have been features of the early civilizations of Assyria, Babylon, China, Egypt, Greece and Rome, as much as of the current industrialized societies, and can help explain some of the dynamics surrounding forest degradation in many developing countries (FAO, 1993).
The process under which national forest cover declines at the expense of agricultural land and other uses may last from decades to centuries and the amount of forest cover with which a country emerges from the land use transition, i.e. "the period of significant reduction in the percentage of national land area covered by forest, bounded at its start and finish by slow or negligible deforestation rates" can vary considerably (Grainger, 1995). While Great Britain's forest cover declined to as little as 5% by the start of this century, Peninsular Malaysia's transition has left the country with a forest cover of around 47% and the Philippines' with around 20-22% (Kummer, 1992; Grainger, 1995).
At the end of the land use transition, forest cover may stabilize due to a number of factors, which can include increased agricultural productivity, stabilized populations, government intervention to protect forests for conservation and guarantee domestic wood supplies, forest protection by the private sector in response to wood scarcities, or the inaccessibility of remaining forest. In many places, the stabilization of forest cover has been followed by an increase due to natural regeneration or afforestation (Mather, 1992). The processes of land use transition and forest replenishment are not automatic, however, and some have argued that deforestation is part and parcel of a system whose positive feedback loops will prevail until accessible forests have been exhausted (Home and Palo, 1995). Neither view is likely to be accurate in all circumstances. Land-use morphology is not merely the outcome of demographic dynamics, but can be influenced by deliberate land-use policies, the design and implementation of which private, public, and non-governmental stakeholders from forestry and other sectors seek to chart.
Within forestry itself, the diversity of concerns, perspectives and claims is extremely broad and cross-cutting among such stakeholder groups as government forest and environment ministries, academic institutions, private sector entities, and environmental civil society organizations (ECSOs).2 Stakeholders may concentrate on single or multiple issues and roles of forests, including ecological, economic, political, social, and cultural roles, and they may or may not consider themselves adherents of the environmental movement.
²The term environmental civil society organizations (ECSOs) is coined here to distinguish them from the larger group of civil society organizations. The term civil society organizations is used to give recognition to the fact that the more generally used term non-governmental organizations (NGOs) excludes a number of important organizations which are also part of civil society. NGOs are thus a subgroup of CSOs. This issue is addressed in greater detail in the following section on the environmental movement in the Asia-Pacific region.
Images conjured up by references to "the environmental movement" commonly involve the more radical elements of the phenomenon. According to such images, environmentalism is invariably associated with tree buggers, the media-intensive activities of Greenpeace, Birkenstock-wearing members of European green political parties, or tree-spiking ecoterrorists. While these are hardly isolated expressions of contemporary environmental activism, they fail to do justice to the comprehensiveness and diversity of the movement, which, like other social movements that evolve around similarly large issue domains, comprises a wealth of distinct ways of thought and action, covering all shades of political ideology.
It is likewise important to note that stakeholders with different ideologies do not necessarily advocate equally different actions. Increasingly, strategic alliances are formed among actors with very distinct missions, but whose temporary interests converge on a single issue in which concerted action can at least partially satisfy the goals of all parties involved. Such alliances are increasingly forged between ECSOs and the private sector, most prominently for initiatives regarding timber certification, ecotourism, and bioprospecting.
The principal reason for the diversity of prominence and opportunities of ECSOs is the different economic and political landscapes prevailing among and within Asia-Pacific nations. An obvious starting point is the distinction between developing and developed countries; however, a number of examples in the region point to the increasing inadequacy of such a crude classification. On the one hand, rapid economic growth in the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong has pointed the way for a growing number of neighbouring nations, including Thailand and Malaysia. On the other hand, unbalanced growth that transforms single regions of a country into magnets of national and international foreign investment continues to mask significant income and wealth inequities with other, less favoured regions. Rapid economic growth has in many places been accompanied by concomitant environmental costs, particularly with respect to forests.
The Asia-Pacific region's population, estimated by the United Nations at 3.18 billion in 1996, approaches 60% of the world's population. Most of the region's countries experience growth rates above 2.0%, while expanding by 48 million persons annually during 1981-90. Population densities vary widely across the region, ranging from 311 persons per square kilometre in South Asia (888 in Bangladesh and 266 in Sri Lanka) to just over three in Oceania and the South Pacific.
Mirroring the demographic distribution, the Asia-Pacific region is home to the world's richest and poorest countries. On the basis of Gross National Product (GNP) per capita, North Asia leads because of the dominance by Japan whose GNP per capita was US$34,630 in 1994. Regional GNP per capita was US$ 1,195 in 1990 for continental Southeast Asia, US$ 826 for Insular Asia, and US$ 347 for South Asia. Data for the Oceania/Pacific region is incomplete, but, without Australia's and New Zealand's developed country per capita incomes which are well above average, could be expected to be below US$ 2,000.
Political approaches to nation-building are as multifaceted and rapidly changing as their economic counterpart strategies. With few notable exceptions, the transitions from one-party states to multi-party democracy witnessed across the region have sometimes evolved in tandem with, but often lagged behind economic transformation. Civil societies have played a central role in many of these transitions and will continue to work towards a legitimization of their presence in the political realm of their respective countries.
Two forces of economic and political nature are currently at work in the Asia-Pacific region, which will, for the horizon stipulated in this paper, have a significant impact on forests and their management, as well as on civil society organizations and their ability to influence developments. The first of these, as much global as regional, is economic and political integration in the form of free trade areas and regional organizations. The principal representatives of this trends are the growing Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC). Both positive and negative side effects of regional economic integration will bear on forests and their management; a number of ECSOs have made it their task to watch the evolution of these agreements, particularly in regards to their environmental consequences.
The second force, which in many ways runs counter to the first one, is sometimes called 'transnational democratization from below' and refers to the general trend of political decentralization. The two are intimately linked inasmuch as changes in pace in one of them are likely to reverberate in the other. For example, as economic decision-making power moves to supranational levels, subnational political entities push for compensation by means of greater autonomy in the management of their affairs, including the management of natural resources such as forests.
Both of these forces tend to undermine the nation-state. Civil society is increasingly stepping in its place, particularly where pluralistic decentralization evolves in stable political environments. In this respect, the role of environmental organizations is very likely to increase over the near to medium future, especially since local governments newly charged with natural resource management often lack either the technical or human capacities, or the confidence of local populations. At the same time, international environmental organizations may find it easier to negotiate agreements or projects with local, rather than central governments.
