In the last two decades, there has been increasing interest in the potential of small-scale non-timber forest product collection and other low-impact uses of the forest for achieving forest conservation. Experience suggests however that such uses do not guarantee conservation and economic outcomes. This book documents and compares methods to assess options for forest-based livelihoods and their outcomes.

This infobrief provides key points that will benefit disadvantaged groups in multistakeholder negotiations. Negotiations that include all the groups or stakeholders concerned should increase democratic decision-making and compromise. Experience has shown that the benefits that disandvantaged groups receive from multistakeholder negotiations depend on how the negotiations are done. This infobrief describes some of the pitfalls of multistakeholder negotiations and proposes ways for disadvantaged groups to avoid them.

REDD initiatives are more likely to succeed if they build on the interests of forest communities and indigenous people. More attention is needed to the balance of incentives, benefits, rights and political participation across levels of decision making, interest groups and administration. Incentives can include payments or other benefits for good practices, developing alternative livelihoods, formalising land tenure and local resource rights and intensifying productivity on nonforest lands.

In a year marked by several formal expert-level meetings on certification of forest management and criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management (C&I), most of which were related to the mandate of the Inter-governmental Panel on Forests (IPF), CIFOR and CATIE decided to lead off by hosting an informal meeting of experts from a cross-section of important certification and C&I initiatives.

This paper makes use of data from a methodological pre-test conducted in and around Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Its purpose was to contribute to the development of principles, criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management (SFM).