How to Measure Governance in Forestry: Key Dimensions and Indicators from Emerging Economic Mechanisms.

In the current debate and analysis on new forms of governance, the attention is rarely focused on the instruments to assess “good governance” effects. A well-consolidated system of indicators for measuring governance does not exist in forestry yet. World-wide, evaluation criteria and related indicators have been developed so far mainly for analyzing policies and governance issues at international, regional or national scales. The World Bank assessment of the governance in a country for evaluating risks of development cooperation investments, and the REFGOV project in Europe to assess the public sector governance are examples of these kind of policy-level analysis. Nevertheless, most of the emerging economic mechanisms for promoting SFM have to be implemented in the field, at local operational scale, by means of projects planning and monitoring instruments. These economic mechanisms are expected to have unprecedented effects on land use policies and related decision making processes, requiring deep changes in the role of stakeholders, in their reciprocal relationships and networking, in communication systems, in decision making procedures, in channels for resources flows: in other words, deep changes on governance. By analyzing examples of emerging economic mechanisms (including PES schemes, REDD-plus projects and forest certification initiatives), the paper aims to individualize key-indicators and related quantitative variables for assessing relevant dimensions of “good governance” in forestry (e.g. transparency, participation, accountability, capacity), at the level of projects implementation. The attempt is to indentify cheap and reliable secondary data’s sources, when available, and proper instruments for collecting and analyzing primary data. Among these instruments, special attention is given to social network analysis and the pattern of relationships established thanks to good management of projects and related conflicts. How these key indicators and instruments can be used to build a complex index to measure the good governance at policy-level or project-level is finally discussed.