Grace Y. Wong

Research Institute for Humanity and Nature

Gender equality in natural resource management is a matter of sustainability and democracy for Sweden’s government, however the country’s forest remains a highly gender-segregated sector. We examine how gender inequality is problematized within Swedish forest and rural policy documents using the What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach....

Forest frontiers are rapidly changing to sites of commodity agriculture throughout the tropics, with far-reaching transformations in landscapes and livelihoods. Many of the dynamics that drive frontier commodification are well-rehearsed since colonial times. Policies to deregulate markets, privatize or formalize land tenure and open borders to trad...

Halting forest loss and achieving sustainable development in an equitable manner require state, non-state actors, and entire societies in the Global North and South to tackle deeply established patterns of inequality and power relations embedded in forest frontiers. Forest and climate governance in the Global South can provide an avenue for the tra...

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are described as integrated and indivisible, where sustainability challenges must be addressed across sectors and scales to achieve global-level sustainability. However, SDG monitoring mostly focuses on tracking progress at national-levels, for each goal individually. This approach ignores lo...

Southeast Asia has long promoted social forestry (SF) in conservation areas, fallow forests, tree plantations, areas in timber concessions and locally managed agro-forest systems, with the engagement of diverse actors and objectives. SF has evolved from early aims of empowerment and devolution of rights advocated by global reform movements, and is...

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to transform and reorient farming systems to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, boost adaptive capacity, and improve productivity while supporting incomes and, ostensibly, food security. In Ghana—the world’s second biggest cocoa producer—the cocoa sector is challenged by increasing global cocoa demand, climate c...

The Anthropocene presents a set of interlinked sustainability challenges for humanity. The United Nations 2030 Agenda has identified 17 specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way to confront these challenges. However, local initiatives have long been addressing issues connected to these goals in a myriad of diverse and innovative ways....

We extend the Actor-Centred Power framework to consider dimensions beyond the life of community natural resource management partnership initiatives by examining social forestry partnership projects in Indonesia. We do this by examining how power constellations realign across the temporal phases that operationalize project partnerships. We propose a...

Non-technical summary Despite efforts to address the global forest crisis, deforestation and degradation continue, so we need to urgently revisit possible solutions. A failure to halt the global forest crisis contributes to climate change and biodiversity loss and will continue to result in inequalities in access to, and benefits from, forest resou...

Studies on power dynamics have helped to develop a better understanding of the role of actors and interests influencing community forestry initiatives. This article introduces a sequential power analysis as a framework for expanding research on power dynamics to better understand the various stages that shape benefit sharing outcomes in community f...

Recent land management policies around the world have experienced a broader political push to resolve forest and land tenure conflict through agrarian reform policy. As a result, conservation bureaucracies are responding with both formal and informal interventions to acknowledge the role of people in forests. In this methods paper, we provide a clo...

Themes of inclusion, empowerment, and participation are recurrent in development discourse and interventions, implying enablement of agency on the part of communities and individuals to inform and influence how policies that affect them are enacted. This article aims to contribute to debates on participation in rural development and environmental c...

Non-technical summary We argue that the ways in which we as humans derive well-being from nature – for example by harvesting firewood, selling fish or enjoying natural beauty – feed back into how we behave towards the environment. This feedback is mediated by institutions (rules, regulations) and by individual capacities to act. Understanding these...

Non-technical summary We argue that the ways in which we as humans derive well-being from nature – for example by harvesting firewood, selling fish or enjoying natural beauty – feed back into how we behave towards the environment. This feedback is mediated by institutions (rules, regulations) and by individual capacities to act. Understanding these...

REDD+ was designed globally as a results-based instrument to incentivize emissions reduction from deforestation and forest degradation. Over 50 countries have developed strategies for REDD+, implemented pilot activities and/or set up forest monitoring and reporting structures, safeguard systems and benefit sharing mechanisms (BSMs), offering lesson...

This handbook, edited by Claudia Ituarte-Lima and Maria Schultz, discusses strategies on how to weave the human right to a clean and healthy environment together with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the post-2020 global biodiversity framework with a focus on the Global South. The authors, from various institutions and countries, reveal...

Despite the growing interest in social forestry (SF), how much do we understand the social, economic and environmental outcomes and the conditions that enable SF to perform? In this article, we use a content analysis of literature on existing traditional SF practiced throughout Indonesia. It examines the outcomes of these systems and the conditions...

Market-driven development is transforming swidden landscapes and having different impacts along intersections of gender, age and class. In Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan, Indonesia, Dayak communities practicing swidden agriculture are making choices on maintaining traditional land use systems, and engaging in rubber, oil palm and conservation (REDD+)...

The rapid expansion of hybrid maize in the uplands of northern Laos is viewed by the government as meeting policy aims related to green economic development. Yet, growing evidence of negative consequences of maize expansion are emerging. Based on farmers' perceptions, we study: (1) farmers' reasons for adopting and abandoning maize, and; (2) implic...

Over the past decade, the cultivation of rubber trees has expanded rapidly throughout the Mekong region to non-traditional rubber growing areas of Laos and Myanmar. Prompted by rising prices from 1990 to 2010 and government agro-industrialization policies, farmers and investors have rushed to plant the new boom crop. A latex price crash in 2011, ho...

KEY POINTS The novel feature of REDD+—results-based payments at jurisdictional scales—remains largely untested due to a lack of international nance and the complexity of such systems. Therefore, it is not yet possible to make rigorous gen- eralized conclusions regarding its current impacts and future potential. National REDD+ initiatives have made...

Interventions to strengthen forest conservation in tropical biomes face multiple challenges. Insecure land tenure and unequal benefit sharing within forest user groups are two of the most important. Using original household-level survey data from 130 villages in six countries, we assess how current wealth inequality relates to tenure security and b...

Swidden cultivation practices have been seen as a major driver of deforestation and forest degradation in Southeast Asia. Using two case studies from Vietnam, this paper examines discourses around swidden practices at multiple levels of governance. Our findings show diverse interpretations of swidden resulting in different policy preferences and po...

Community forestry or social forestry (henceforth referred collectively as SF) programs have become new modes of forest management empowering local managers and hence, allowing integration of diverse local practices and support of local livelihoods. Implementation of these initiatives, however, face multiple challenges. State-prescribed community p...

Policy instruments for implementing the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) mechanism operate within an orchestra of policy mixes that affect the forest and other land sectors. How will policymakers choose between the myriad of options for distributing REDD+ benefits, and...

In this paper, we use a new game-based tool to evaluate the immediate and longer-term behavioral change potential of three different payment for environmental services (PES) delivery mechanisms: direct payments for individual performance, direct payments for group performance and insurance. Results from four rural shifting-cultivation dependent com...

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) is envisioned as a performance-based incentive to influence forest use behavior and governance towards the preservation and management of forests. In relatively forest-rich Lao PDR, the policy space that REDD+ planners are attempting to navigate is populated by enduring political...

Implications of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) for trans-boundary agricultural commodities, forests and smallholder farmers Key points • ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) integration may increase pressures on the region's forests and smallholder farmers as agricultural production becomes more regionalized. • The AEC proposes countering possible ne...

This paper focuses on the assessment of legislative considerations and local perceptions of equity in Vietnam's Payments for Forest Ecosystem Services scheme (PFES). Equity perceptions are powerful determinants of human behaviour and, consequently, many environmental conflicts arise from contested visions of what constitutes as ‘equitable’ environm...

International negotiations for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were finally concluded in 2015. However, due to the complex design and implementation processes of REDD+ policies and measures, including benefit...

Key points: 1) Smallholder rubber production in southern Myanmar has alleviated rural poverty, while large-scale plantation concessions in the north have led to land expropriation and limited livelihood options for rural people. 2) Policies should support smallholder rubber production over large-scale models, while addressing the economic challenge...

Key points: 1) The opportunities provided by rubber cultivation in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) have been offset by sustainability challenges, such as low prices, food insecurity, land expropriation, deforestation and a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. 2) Smallholder rubber has had the greatest success in alleviating p...

Swidden is often blamed for deforestation but research has shown that these traditional systems can have a role in maintaining and enhancing carbon stocks and therefore could be compatible with efforts such as payments for environmental services (PES) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) schemes in Vietnam. This...

In many countries, the state owns or manages forests in the national interests of economic development, ecosystem service provision or biodiversity conservation. A national approach to reducing deforestation and forest degradation and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) will thus most likely involve governmental entities at different go...

Forested areas of Kalimantan, Indonesia, are often inhabited by swiddeners, and are also targeted by a range of interventions related to development and forest conservation, including REDD+. Whether these interventions are adopted, adapted or rejected by the local people is linked to the varying degrees of access to information that different types...

This study investigates returns of scale, estimates technical efficiency, and identifies the determinant factors of the efficiency of small-scale cassava farming in Vientiane and Savannakhet provinces, Lao PDR. Cross-sectional data on inputs, output, and farming characteristics from 193 cassava farmers were collected for this study. The maximum lik...

A framework was developed for the construction of an objectives hierarchy for multicriteria decisions in land use planning. The process began through identification of fundamental objectives; these were iteratively decomposed into a hierarchy of subobjectives until a level was reached at which subobjectives had measurable attributes. Values were de...

There are currently five payment distribution models implemented in Dien Bien and Son La provinces under the national payment for forest environmental services (PFES) program for community forests: (1) equal distribution to all households within a community, (2) payment for forest protection groups, (3) building infrastructure, (4) community invest...

This paper reviews the literature on migration within and from rural areas of Southeast Asia to examine the effects of redistribution of labor and remittances on livelihoods and land-use practices, as well as contexts in which migration drives, yet is also driven by, social and environmental change. Gaps in the literature and areas of contention an...

Local people’s preferences for how revenue from payments for environmental services (PES) schemes is distributed and used, and their ability to influence spending decisions, can shape the scheme’s effectiveness in achieving forest management and poverty reduction goals. We examine how the interplay between institutions, norms, and decision-making p...

Benefit sharing is the distribution of direct and indirect net gains from the implementation of REDD+. It includes direct benefits (monetary gains or increased availability of forest ecosystem services and goods) as well as indirect ones (e.g. improved governance infrastructure provision) (Luttrell et al. 2013). Lessons on effectiveness, efficiency...

This presentation by Pham Thu Thuy, Grace Wong, Anastasia Yang, Le Ngoc Dung, Karen Bennett, Vu Tan Phuong given during a workshop in Hanoi, Vietnam analyses the Payments for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) policy in Vietnam through the lens of achieving effectiveness, efficiency and equity. http://www.cifor.org/lessons-learnt-cifor-research-p...

The rapid economic growth in Lao PDR over the last two decades has been driven by the natural resource sectors and commercialization in the agriculture sector. Rural landscapes are being transformed over the past decade from land use mosaics of subsistence and smallholder farms to large-scale plantations dominated by a few commercial crops. The cap...

The aim of this working paper is to provide a global overview and up‑to‑date profile of REDD+ benefit‑sharing mechanisms, and to analyse the political‑economic factors influencing their design and setting. The analysis draws primarily on a review of existing benefit‑sharing mechanisms for REDD+ and natural forest management, namely fund‑based appro...

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia, is threatened by declining water quality largely derived from agricultural run-off. Water quality planning aims to mitigate pollutant run-off through land management, including riparian and wetland restoration, but no tools exist to assess trade-offs in land use change across the catchment-to-reef continuum....

Hydrological processes have been identified as delivering ecosystem services that are fundamental to both human well-being and the maintenance of biodiversity. If we can map the hydrological processes and the threats to them, the integrity of the provision of ecosystem services from the catchment can be identified, highlighting areas in need of fur...

A dynamic optimization model is used to compare the profitability of silvopasture with traditional cattle ranching in south Florida. Silvopasture can reduce phosphorus runoff from cattle ranching – a major environmental concern for Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Silvopasture can also sequester carbon, thereby offsetting global climate change....

It is often said that poor rural households in developing countries remain inadequately insured against shocks. Using panel data from Tawahka Amerindians in the Honduran rainforest, a horticultural/foraging society, we estimate the consumption-smoothing ability and vulnerability to risks of 32 households in two villages with varying degrees of mark...

The inclusion of forest sinks as a carbon dioxide (CO2) mitigation strategy at the climate negotiations in Marakech (November, 2001) is expected to lead to increased investments in forest establishment and management by many developed countries. Previous studies in this area have typically focused on market impacts in the forestry sector, such as c...

This book addresses key issues currently shaping the future of private forestry. The main subjects covered in the 27 chapters include the emergence of a new paradigm for public involvement in private forestry, the challenges of sustainability, forest certification programmes, and country experiences from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

The linkage between global climate change and forests have assumed political prominence as forest sinks are now acknowledged as a means for offsetting carbon dioxide (CO,) emissions under the Kyoto Protocol targets. As such, policies to stimulate forest carbon sequestration in an open economy will require varying levels of economic information to a...