Forest Certification in Developing and Transitioning ... - UTas ePrints

forest certification in guatemala
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Improvements in Community Organization
In the absence of baseline data, it is difficult to provide clear evidence for improvements
in relatively complex processes such as community organization. Nonetheless,
the fulfillment of several corresponding conditions can be seen as an indicator for
unmistakable progress in this respect. In particular, forest certification helped to
improve the level of community organization in some of the certified concessions by
requiring:
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Development of a strategic plan, internal regulations, operations manuals.
The aim of many of the conditions assigned during the assessment process
was to clarify the mission and objectives of the community organization.
Some salient issues were: the definition and prioritization of the work
guidelines, the evaluation of the economic and social viability of projects,
improvement of the current organizational structure and regulations,
greater participation by different stakeholders, improved definition of the
criteria in order to define benefits, among others. However, while the
documents required by the certification assessment are available, their
application is often lacking.
Organization of production structures. Certification stimulated the creation
of various committees responsible for specific tasks, such as forest extraction,
supervision of logging operations, forest fires, women, control of illegal
logging, among others.
Conflict Management
Certification assessments have generally identified a lack of conflict management
mechanisms regarding organizational, managerial and administrative aspects of forest
operations. By promoting the establishment of clear rules and regulations, forest
certification has made a significant contribution to manage and, wherever possible,
mitigate conflicts.
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Land use mapping and planning. In this aspect, the main contribution of
certification was to promote land use mapping and planning initiatives
begun by NGOs and CONAP. This is particularly critical in some concessions
in order to define land tenure in areas where agricultural activities
are practiced on an individual or household level. Greater clarity and stability
in terms of land use has been gained by spatially defining the agricultural
production areas on a management unit level, and specifying these
in the management plan. In other cases, the certification assessment has
required that existing land use mapping and planning be respected.
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NTFP extraction. The relationship between traditional harvesters of
NTFPs (principally of Chamaedorea palm, chicle gum, and allspice) and
the new concession-holders has not always been entirely clear. The certification
assessments detected this weakness and required the establishment
yale school of forestry & environmental studies