It is widely accepted that forest resources should be managed to meet the economic, ecological and cultural needs of present and future generations. Therefore forest management must respond to environmental, social and economic issues. This requires feedback of relevant information between planning, implementation, control and impacts of forest management. An hierarchical system of principles, criteria and indicators can be used to organise this information in a manner useful to conceptualise, evaluate and implement sustainable management of forests (Lammerts van Bueren and Blom 1997; Prabhu et al. 1999).

The concept of criteria and indicators (C&I), which was designed to be used...

The guidelines and iterative process for the development and evaluation of C&I developed by CIFOR for natural forests were adopted for the present project. The methods and procedures used by three different expert teams in the field tests and the compilation and analysis of the results from these tests are described below.

At the commencement of the project, the conceptual framework of Principles, Criteria and Indicators for sustainable forest management, as outlined by Prabhu et al. (1996) was discussed with the expert teams. It is important that team members with different expertise understand the conceptual framework so that the team...

All teams were provided with documents that were used for C&I evaluation including a “tool box”. This “tool box” was subsequently published (CIFOR 1999). The first step of the C&I evaluation was that all teams were required to include as many C&I as possible (a so-called base set) from well-known international sources such as ITTO, CIFOR, LEI, WWF-IUCN and SmartWood. The selected C&I were recorded on Form 1 and team experts were then required to reject any C&I considered to be irrelevant to the conditions prevailing at the sites in question. It should be noted that it took several days...

The IFGM is an adaptive process that actually allows for some level of modification and creative input by the field test team. The first team selected a base set of C&I from a wide range of sources while subsequent teams made use of this initial work to select a candidate set of C&I for field testing at the second and third test sites. It was generally concluded that more time was needed to carry out home-based analysis for the selection of a candidate set of C&I.

Most of the social experts commented that time allocated for the evaluation of social...