The PARTNERS restoration network, in collaboration with IFRI, is developing a special issue on Governance Innovations for Forest Restoration to be published in an upcoming issue of World Development Perspectives. This special issue will include 10 short descriptive case reports, similar to those found in the inaugural World Development Perspectives issue, here.

Governance Innovations for Forest Restoration

Governance structures are needed to promote forest restoration

Restoring forests involves assisting forest ecosystems to recover function and structure over time. At the landscape level, in order for forest restoration to be adopted and sustained, it must be attractive to multiple stakeholders with diverse goals that unfold over different spatial and temporal scales. Thus, restoring forest landscapes inherently involves interactions between many levels and types of organizations, institutions, and people, and its governance is fundamentally different from managing individual forest patches.
As a global paradigm, restoring forest landscapes is a relatively new idea. The governance structures that facilitate and sustain forest landscape restoration over time are not obvious, and are an urgent research frontier. Fortunately, examples of forest landscape restoration can be found in different contexts around the world. This special issue will feature case reports detailing (1) Innovations in governance institutions that have supported landscape restoration in a given context and (2) Innovative use of existing governance structures to produce landscape level forest restoration.

For more information, contact Sarah Wilson (sjwil@umich.edu), Ashwini Chhatre (ashwini_chhatre@isb.edu), or Dominique Cagalanan (d.cagalanan@cgiar.org).