Summary of the Proceedingsof the International Workshop 'The International Regime, Avoided Deforestation and the Evolution of Public and Private Policies Towards Forests in Developing Countries' held in Paris, 21-23rd November 2007

摘要

On hundred and forty participants from all over the world gathered for this workshop a few days prior to the 13th Conference of Parties (CoP 13) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Bali in December 2007. Several observations led to the organisation of this workshop. Forest policies implemented in heavily forested tropical countries appear to be converging in terms of objectives and types of natural resource management. Such convergence might result from the adoption of a certain number of instruments, including (i) forest concessions in order to organise production within objectives established by sustainable resource management; (ii) transnational normative tools such as forest certification which is gradually imposing itself through markets; and (iii) the prospect of an avoided deforestation mechanism established through negotiations that were opened at the UN Conference on climate change. Along with a number of institutions (such as United Nations Forum on Forestand International Tropical Timber Organisation) and international agreements (e.g., International Tropical Timber Agreement and the 2007 Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forest) which act as vectors for different forest management principles (conservation, participation, sustainable logging, etc.), all these elements could be analysed as part of the emergence or consolidation of an international forests regime. For purposes of the workshop, international forest regime concept has been proposed by M.-C. Smouts, based on definitions proposed by Le Prestre (2002): "A regime is generally understood as a set of interrelated norms, rules and procedures that structure the behavior and relations of international actors so as to reduce the uncertainties that they face and facilitate the pursuit of a common interest in a given issue area~(-1). Regimes are international social institutions in that they constitute "persistent and connected sets of rules and practices that prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity and shape expectations" (idem).