De la gestion forestière durable à la bonne gouvernance des forêts : la production d’indicateurs, toujours

Criteria and indicators (C&I) of sustainable forest management (SFM) have been designed with the aim of defining better what SFM consists in, but they have provided limited help in guiding public policies on forests. They are seldom used for evaluation of those policies, and have mainly contributed to the control of management practices, sometimes providing arguments, albeit rhetorical, to international donors and decisionmakers. The difficulty in using outcome indicators in forest policy evaluation has progressively led to putting greater emphasis on indicators of governance, which the international development agencies — the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) — have just agreed upon with non governmental organisations. Made up essentially of organisational indicators that are intended to be less prescriptive, this new perspective links in, to varying degrees, with systematic targeting of SFM. The limitations of C&I for SFM in terms of policy development does not in any way prevent them from playing a role as a potential basis for democratization of public decisions in the forest sector, to the extent that they serve as a learning mechanism among actors in building up forest management and policy. This is particularly meaningful in the case of participatory decision processes, at both global (formulation of policy guidelines) and local (example of the forest territories charters) levels.