Provides an assessment of the international forest regime, in reponse to calls from many quarters, including the UN Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) and the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development, as well as several NGOs. The focus is mainly on action taken by countries at the global level, in the framework of legally binding instruments and institutions. It builds on previous analyses of the international forest regime by looking beyond the legal mandates to begin exploring the actual performance of the components against their mandates. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) Proposals for Action as the point for departure, the effectiveness and impact of individual legal instruments and global instutions are analyzed, as is the potential for synergy between them.

Synthesis of the various components of international law that have an impact on forests and provides a policy framework for conservation and sustainable use, against which any future global forest regime shoud be measured.

In recent decades, globalization and internationalization led to an increase in the number of international regimes attempting to influence national behaviour over many different issues. By using the case of the international forest regime complex this thesis seeks to evaluate how an international organization such as the World Bank and private institutions of forest certification influence domestic forest policy. The cases of Argentina and Armenia were selected as examples of developing countries open to international influences with weak forest sectors that went through a recent administrative restructuring. In so doing this dissertation seeks to answer how do international and transnational organizations influence domestic forest policies? The results show that: the influence of the World Bank in Argentina and Armenia pushed the forest sector towards deregulation; state bureaucracies play an important role in the implementation of transnational regimes at the national level; the political system of federal countries provides multiple institutional access points for policy change that international and transnational regimes try to use in order to influence the domestic level, consequently changing the power balance of the domestic networks.

​It was hoped that by paying forest dependent peoples and countries for their “service” of conserving their forests, REDD+ would lead to a reduction in deforestation greenhouse gases. The complexities have, however, left some ambiguities. It was never agreed who would pay for the program, and it has been criticized as ignoring the root causes of forest loss. Considering the motivations of those who promoted REDD+ this book proposes remedies to its shortfalls and recommends more efficient, equitable and effective conservation policies.

Despite covering almost a third of the globe, forests do not enjoy the protection of a singular global legal convention. Instead, International Forest Law is a complex ecosystem in its own right. This book sets out to examine this complexity by analyzing forest-related Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and how the decisions of the various corresponding Conferences of the Parties (COPs) may promote regime interaction in this field of law. Through an in-depth analysis of more than 60 decisions and resolutions of such COPs, Yilly Pacheco discusses how secondary law-making activity in forest-related MEAs may be strengthened and used to fill the gaps in International Forest Law.

This book investigates the potential need for an international convention on forests and establishes a multifunctional concept of forests as a cornerstone for international forest regulation. Accordingly, it examines a variety of international instruments pertaining directly or indirectly to forests and explores their entangled, fragmented nature. While contending that the lack of consistency in international law impedes the development of a stand-alone international forest convention, at the same time it argues that the lessons learned from fragmentation as well as from the history of forest discourse on the international level open up new options for the regulation of forests in international law, based on (new) concepts of coordination and cooperation.

This book provides a uniquely detailed and systematic comparison of environmental forest policies and enforcement in twenty countries worldwide, covering developed, transition and developing economies. The goal is to enhance global policy learning and promote well-informed and precisely-tuned policy solutions.