Background and Objectives: Plantation forests remain a highly contested element of rural development. Successive reviews of large-scale plantations established under land concessions identify predominantly negative impacts on local farmers’ livelihoods. Although concession models of plantation development have been common in the global South, other models characterised by different forms of land tenure, labour arrangements, and plantation design have also emerged. The impacts of these models on the livelihoods of local farmers are likely to be more varied.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) offers developing countries an opportunity to engage in global climate change mitigation through the sale of carbon credits for reforestation, avoided deforestation and forest conservation projects. Funding for REDD+ projects has increased in recent years and REDD+ projects have proliferated, but relatively few studies have, as yet, examined their implementation. Here, we present a synthesis of the challenges and lessons learned while implementing a REDD+ project in an Emberá community in Panama.

The importance of trust has been widely acknowledged as a major antecedent and a constitutive element of information exchange in policy networks. The ultimate objective of the present article is to understand whether and how trust is a factor explaining patterns of limited information exchange between forestry and nature conservation actors in forest policy networks in Europe.

Globalization and commodity exports have a long history in affecting land use changes and land rights on the tropical forest frontier. This paper reviews a century of social and environmental discourse around land issues for four commodities grown in the humid tropics—rubber, cocoa, oil palm and bananas. States have exercised sovereign rights over land and forest resources and the outcomes for deforestation and land rights of existing users have been quite varied depending on local institutional contexts and political economy.

The capacity of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) forests to sequestrate carbon has attracted interest from the international community to protect forests for carbon storage and alleviate rural poverty by establishing REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Using information gathered from interviews, focus groups, field observations, and policy document analysis, this paper demonstrates that REDD+ is not well adapted to the institutional structures of forest governance in the DRC, including both statutory and customary tenure.

REDD+ has been proposed as a viable option for addressing climate change in the near term, and at relatively low cost. There is a broad consensus that clearly defined tenure rights are important for the implementation and success of REDD+, both to manage forests effectively and to protect local communities’ livelihoods. We use primary data from 23 villages in six REDD+ pilot sites in Tanzania to identify causes of deforestation and forest degradation, and tenure rights issues, at the village level prior to project implementation.

Forming a backbone of the wood supply in Vietnam, approximately 50% of plantation areas are managed by individual households. Of the planted species, the Acacia (Acacia auriculiformis A. Cunn. ex Benth. × Acacia mangium Willd) hybrid is one of the most preferred by timber growers. Yet, information on the potential of this timber species for rural livelihoods is lacking.

Forests in the dry tropics differ significantly from forests in the humid tropics in their biomass and in their socio-ecological contexts, so it might be reasonable to assume that the dynamics that drive deforestation in these two settings would also differ. Until recently, difficulties in measuring the extent of dry tropical forests have made it difficult to investigate this claim empirically.

In recent decades, Serbia has been undergoing a period of post-socialist transition that has significantly altered the value system underlying spatial development due to alteration of ownership frameworks and land use rights. In consequence, issues have arisen of how to strike a balance between the various interests involved in the distribution of spatial resources and how to control the outcomes of public policies. Land use planning has been identified as an efficient instrument for implementing the public policy value framework.

Land use governance in the Brazilian Amazon has undergone significant changes in the last decade. At the national level, law enforcement capacity has increased and downstream industries linked to commodity chains responsible for deforestation have begun to monitor some of their suppliers’ impacts on forests. At the municipal level, local actors have launched a Green Municipality initiative, aimed at eliminating deforestation and supporting green supply chains at the territorial level.

Command-and-control policies are often criticized as insufficient to tackle tropical deforestation. Over the past two decades, both academics and policy-makers have promoted incentive-based policies, notably REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), as attractive alternatives to curb forest loss, while also potentially contributing to the poverty reduction of forest-dwelling populations. Governments have been the driving force behind the largest incentive-based forest conservation programs in Latin America.

Implementation of forest restoration projects requires cross-scale and hybrid forms of governance involving the state, the market, civil society, individuals, communities, and other actors. Using a case study from the Atlantic Forest Hotspot, we examine the governance of a large-scale forest restoration project implemented by an international non-governmental organization (NGO) on family farmer landholdings located within protected areas of sustainable development.