Small-scale forest-linked producers are crucial to development and environmental protection. But this group is notoriously challenging to track. Overlapping categories of actors, informal trade of goods, and persistent policy narratives favouring large-scale, industrial forestry, mean that small-scale forest-linked producers and small enterprises are not only not counted – they are overlooked. It has been suggested that locally controlled forest-linked land use – by individual forest-linked producers, small-scale forest and farm producer organisations, and small enterprises – exceeds, in its collective scale, all other forms of private sector land use (Campbell 2015). Yet the full potential of this land use for...

Small-scale locally controlled forestry is managed within diverse ownership models and different units of organisation from family and smallholders, to community forestry and indigenous territories (see, for example, Kozak 2008; Macqueen and DeMarsh 2016). Furthermore, the mosaic nature of rural landscapes makes ‘forest’ and ‘agriculture’ challenging to demarcate (Bakkegaard et al. 2016). Because of this diversity, assessing the scope of small-scale locally controlled forest producers can quickly become confounded by variations of categorisation, with different sources relaying different elements, using different lenses, or drawing different boundaries around these producers. For example, in the 2014 State of the World’s Forests Report,...

Efforts to assess the world’s forest resources have a rich history. The first attempt to quantify these resources was published in 1910 by the US Forest Service (Zon 1910). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) later took up the responsibility for making World Forest Inventories (WFIs) and latterly Global Forest Resource Assessments (Holmgren and Persson 2002). These collected, in a systematic fashion, data compiled by in-country forest authorities. Initially data was restricted to forest cover and trade – with forest employment being covered by the International Labour Organization (ILO) (eg Poschen and Lovgren 2001). But more...

This issue paper describes work in progress. At this stage, we are concerned primarily with making conclusions about the challenges in assessing the scope and collective scale of small and locally controlled forest-linked investment, and to outline what we intend to do next in collaboration with others.

Results from this initial exploration are educative. They show that, with some investigation, the scope for small and locally controlled forest-linked investment is potentially huge, and they show that a collection of estimates of the scale of some of its components can be compiled. Both scope and scale information to date beg many...