The lack of financial inputs and access to microfinance services is a problem for local producers of forest products, especially in the case of small-scale enterprises. This publication reviews major issues and constraints facing small-scale enterprises in developing countries trying to access microfinance services, and identifies ways to overcome these...

Seed banks offer the opportunity of conserving large amounts of plant diversity, cheaply and effectively at least to the end of this century. This technology has mainly been applied over the past 50 years to conserving the diversity within the relatively few domesticated (crop) species, thereby making it available for...

The relationship between tropical forests and global climate change has so far focused on mitigation, while much less emphasis has been placed on how management activities may help forest ecosystems adapt to this change. This paper discusses how tropical forestry practices can contribute to maintaining or enhancing the adaptive capacity...

The Local Unit Criteria and Indicators Development (LUCID) test was a collaborative initiative among eight national forests, their leadership teams, and the Inventory and Monitoring Institute (IMI). IMI has a wealth of additional material available about the LUCID Test Project, its results, toolkit, and implementation strategies. To better serve diverse...

With the start of economic reforms in 1978, China’s forest sector was caught up in a whirlwind of change. It began with the devolution of forest tenures in rural areas, but led to reform of state-owned forest enterprises via introduction of stumpage fees and liberalized forest product prices. From the...

Forests play a key role in mountain areas, providing goods and services essential to the livelihood of both highland and lowland communities. Freshwater streaming down from mountains is accessible to more than half of the world's population and available for the most varied needs, such as drinking, cooking and washing,...

Multi-stakeholder forest management, or collaborative forest management as it is known in Ghana, has been an initiative of the Forest Services Division of the Forestry Commission of Ghana since 1992. This initiative was emphasised as a policy in the Forest Wildlife Policy of 1994. Collaboration was described by the Forestry...

Those engaged in multi-stakeholder consultations are faced with a plethora of potentially useful techniques to promote public involvement through: information sharing, communications, planning, negotiating, consensus building and conflict resolution. Methods continue to proliferate as successive authors invent new language for or fine-tune classical techniques. The consulting fraternity frequently appropriates well-known...

The National Programme for Food Security has an overall goal to provide the entire nation with secure supplies of accessible, nutritious and safe food to enable healthy livelihoods and high labour productivity, founded on the participation of people, government, the public and private sectors.

This research work was commissioned to the Foundation for People and Community Development Inc (FPCD) Papua New Guinea (PNG), by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) under the Norway Partnership Programme (NPP) “Forests for Sustainable Livelihoods”. The paper dwells on trade-related instruments influencing trade in non-wood...