From Global Forest Governance To Privatised Social Forestry: Company-Community Partnerships In The Ecuadorian Choco

Laura Rival (qeh)

QEH Working Papers from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

Abstract: Nearly 200 million hectares of topical forests were lost between 1980 and 1995, which led many conservationists to argue for a ban on all commercial logging and land conversion in tropical forest areas. Both logging companies and national governments were seen as sharing responsibility for the massive destruction of tropical rainforests, and various attempts were made to design new multilateral regimes, and new multipartite institutions for the global protection and sustainable management of key natural resources. In the 1990s, local partnerships were implemented to encourage private sector involvement in sustainable forest management and forest conservation. This paper describes a business partnership between a leading South American wood-processing group and a number of indigenous communities in one of the world's ten biodiversity 'hotspots.' It shows that the decentralisation of the development process, the recognition of local communities as legal entities in the management of natural resources, and the active involvement of profit-oriented firms in biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation, all contribute to the emergence of new alliances between government, the forestry sector, conservation and human rights organisations, and local forest communities. This case study highlights the role that private companies are able to play in changing environmentally damaging business practices, in fostering social development, and in reforming government policies. It also points to the dangers of uncritical reliance on market mechanisms to promote sustainability

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://workingpapers.qeh.ox.ac.uk/RePEc/qeh/qehwps/qehwps117.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to workingpapers.qeh.ox.ac.uk:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qeh:qehwps:qehwps117

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in QEH Working Papers from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford Queen Elizabeth House 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by IT Support ().