Rethinking Forest Regulations: Overcoming the challenges of regulatory reform

This brief is directed towards public forest sector policy and decision makers involved with the regulation and oversight of natural and regenerated forests. As such, it speaks to a narrow but extremely critical area of forest governance: forest regulations and regulatory processes as instruments and vehicles for achieving sustainable forest management (SFM) objectives. Many of the drivers and factors that mitigate against SFM lie outside the forest sector, such as forest conversion for agriculture; it is neither the purpose nor the intention of this piece to attempt to address these. Here, the intent is to focus upon issues that normally would lie within the legal mandate of public forest sector agencies and thus, within the possibilities of their leaders to affect change.