Certification of sustainable forest management has been promoted as a tool for maintaining or enhancing forest values (i.e. biophysical, social, economic, and policy) for more than twenty years. Tapping into this experience to learn about the contribution of forest management certification to the maintenance or improvement of a range of forest values should be a priority.

Given limited budgets for promoting the conservation and responsible management of tropical forests, it is critical to identify the most effective interventions. However, there is clearly no ‘silver bullet’ but interventions that work better when implemented in particular ways to achieve particular outcomes in...

Policies and goals of forest conservation, use, and management evolve dynamically over time, as determined by individual and societal values and socio-economic conditions as well as political conditions (Cubbage et al. 2007). Forestry includes diverse stakeholders at various scales (Krott 2005); domestic actors interact with international/transnational forces to shape resource use policies (Bernstein et al. 2010, Gellert 2010). Forest policies are therefore taken at a range of levels, depending on modes of governance and institutional regimes (Coleman 2009). Forest conservation and management are also strongly linked with development activities (de Camino 2005, Sandker et al. 2012), thus decisions about forest...

Market-based, voluntary forest management certification, which has been operating for almost two decades, is claimed to improve forest management practices (e.g., Moore et al. 2012, Nebel et al. 2005, Newsom et al. 2005, Pena-Claros et al. 2009, Rametsteiner and Simula 2003, Ruslandi et al. 2014). Unfortunately, few empirical evaluations of this conservation strategy have been carried out to date, particularly for natural tropical forests (Miteva et al. 2012, Moore et al. 2012, Romero et al. 2013). The only two studies that evaluated the impacts of certification in tropical forests were based on comparisons of certified and un-certified forest management units...

Although voluntary, marked-based forest certification as a strategy for conserving natural tropical forests has been underway for more than two decades, field-based assessments of its impacts are scarce at least partially because such evaluations are costly, time consuming, and methodologically challenging (Pena-Claros et al. 2009, Moore et al. 2012, Romero et al. 2013). Unfortunately, seemingly straightforward comparisons between certified and uncertified forest management units (FMUs) are prone to be biased because well-run FMUs are more likely to seek certification (Romero and Castren 2013). Furthermore, such comparisons fail to recognize that at different times, FMUs can be at different stages along...

Credible evaluations of the impacts of forest certification require rigorous methods for the establishment of comparative groups (i.e., counterfactuals; e.g., Ferraro 2009, Blackman and Rivera 2011). In the case of FSC certification of forest management, credible counterfactual analyses require the selection of uncertified (control) concessions that share pertinent characteristics with the certified (treated) units (Romero et al. 2013). This selection requires thorough understanding of potentially confounding variables that could affect the outcomes of the intervention (e.g., avoided deforestation or reduced soil erosion). Some of these variables can be observable characteristics of the FMUs of contextual factors under which these FMUs...

The chapters in this volume provide much of the information needed for the design of an empirical evaluation of selected outcomes of FSC certification in Indonesia. The political economy analysis reveals the linkages among the several factors at different levels that shaped power relations among social actors (i.e., government; timber sector; consumers and market dynamics; environmental groups) with stakes in forests right allocation and conservation, forest management decisions, and ultimately, FSC certification. This analysis reveals how power dynamics around the valuable timber resources and subsequent actions shaped changes in regulatory frameworks (e.g., incentives, log-export bans, oil palm moratorium) and other...