 I've been asked to introduce a session by providing background context on the topic of governance challenges in the forest farm interface. First, it is important to explain how we conceptualize a forest farm interface and why this type of landscape presents specific types of government governance challenges. We use this concept to describe the types of landscapes occupied by the rural population most of the areas in the world work around the world in which we work. These landscapes support the livelihoods of high percentages of the rural populations in these countries. As Valentina mentioned, recently Peter Newton and co-authors estimated that this population was about 1.6 billion forest proximate people around the world. These landscapes produce large quantities of food, fuel, fiber and environmental services that support rural residents and urban populations alike. And however these landscapes do not fit neatly into conventional concepts used by policymakers and development planners. So often in official views there is a strict economy between forest and agriculture. And as a result policymakers hold negative views of the smallholder land use is found in these landscapes. These landscapes are often seen as degraded, poorly managed in need of protection because they are threatened by unauthorized deforestation or deforestation or illegal harvest. Conversely, agricultural lands in these landscapes are seen as unproductive, inefficiently used or disorganized. Smallholder producers on these landscapes are often treated as illegitimate. They are frequently seen as migrant invaders, even though in many cases they have occupied these lands for decades if not generations. Smallholder producers are often seen as backwards with low capacities with irrational beliefs and practices that waste resources and land and land through inefficient use. Frequently they are characterized as impediments to national progress or modernization. More often they are simply underappreciated, misunderstood or ignored. While these comments are broad generalizations, these types of views do frame how government actors regard broad swaths of the rural lands where we are working. These beliefs undercut efforts to promote equitable and sustainable development as well as conservation efforts. Alternatively, we have been trying to frame understanding of these rural landscapes under the rubric of the Forest Farm Interface to better acknowledge the complexity and the potential of these systems while also recognizing the challenges they face. So how do we define the Forest Farm Interface? The Forest Farm Interface is a multifunctional land use and land cover mosaic managed by family farmers and communities. The resource management systems of these local actors take place at variable scales across plots, properties, communities and watersheds. In these landscapes we can identify diversity of land use systems, products and services that reflect a diversity of livelihood strategies. These systems combine forest fragments, fallows and systems. They are mosaics that are temporarily and spatially complex and adapted to local circumstances, and they reflect local biophysical characteristics, available technologies, infrastructural capacities and market dynamics. Finally, producers in these landscapes include a heterogeneous collection of family farms, smallholder enterprises and nested social organization. What are the governance challenges faced by the Forest Farm Interface? First, the producers present in the Forest Farm Interface often fall outside of formal systems and categories. Often these families have insecure undocumented properties because they lack formal property rights, they are usually excluded from official programs. These producers maintain local governance systems framing behaviors that are usually unrecognized because they are customary systems. These include systems of authority, reciprocity, resource allocation and conflict mediation. Also typically when these producers engage with the market they do so through informal value chains. While these arrangements can be effective and adaptive, they also put these producers at risk to state sanction, and they also leave them in weak positions to engage with other market actors. And because these systems are unrecognized and informal, they often are threatened in multiple fronts. For example, official programs or development initiatives can impose organizational structures and institutions such as formal associations, cooperatives or user groups that ignore existing arrangements or are superimposed on them. As a result, they undercut customary systems, disrupt local patterns of authority, resource allocation and benefit distribution or conflict mediation. These new externally imposed organizations can also introduce or solidify patterns of inequality, allowing elite capture or exclusion of marginalized resource users. In some cases, development policies can grant resource access and empower external actors or third parties without acknowledging local claims or institutions. When this happens, it can facilitate displacement of smallholder mosaics and which are replaced by alternative land uses or resource users. In the process the shift in rights can generate conflict and violence. The forest farm interface often occurs in frontier areas where formal government is absent or agencies are weak. This means residents in these landscapes lack access to crucial institutional services and support, such as credit extension services legal support or police protection. When state agencies are present, they typically emphasize environmental regulation and compliance, often resulting in sporadic and uneven enforcement of rules, which results in uncertainty and generates risks for producers. Finally, when these systems, when these efforts for conventional, when there are efforts for conventional policy reform, the process often excludes or ignores smallholders in their production systems. To explain this, and before concluding, I would like to reflect on some more on this point. Over the past five or six years, we have been analyzing multiple attempts at reform of forest policies to address the needs of communities and smallholder producers in the Amazon. These include efforts to introduce administrative mechanisms to approve the use of forest resources by smallholders in Peru, attempts to include smallholder producers and farmer managed natural regeneration within a national plantation registry also in Peru, and attempts to streamline administrative processes for small scale community forest management in Amapá, Brazil. In the process we observed a number of policy barriers that limited the reach and effectiveness of these initiatives. By drawing attention to these points, we hope to highlight a few possible ways forward. First, reforms frequently imposed uniform institutional models or concepts developed for context and scales, other concepts and context and scales. For example, management planning procedures relied on management models and concepts designed to guide decision making in the management of extensive stands of all growth forests, rather than the management of pioneer species and second growth fellows. Second reform processes failed to address institutional inertia or jurisdictional overlap. In several cases, small cadres or reformers found that their well attentioned initiatives had limited influence within large institutions, resistance to change. In the Amapá case, mechanisms designed to take advantage of opportunities for state level policy innovation still required their approval of national level agencies that stuck to existing approval processes which block the introduction of reforms. Third, even when there is interest in reforms, in practice emphasis continues to be placed on compliance, enforcement and sanctions, rather than facilitation incentives or the creation of enabling conditions. Finally, reforms often focused on sectoral procedures, for example forest management regulations, but did not address the continued exclusion of small holders as legitimate stakeholders. For example, in contexts where small holders lack land title and rely on customary systems, their property rights are unrecognized, so they are unable to participate and receive formal permission to manage resources. Also, regulatory reforms tend to emphasize conservation measures rather than sustainable production, so did not reflect the interest of small holders and these points are going to be very relevant in the discussion of the agroforestry concessions in a moment. While it is encouraging to see that reforms intended to facilitate better governance at the forest farm interface continue, it is clear that greater effort is needed to produce outcomes that will outcomes we would like to see. So, this begs the question, are we on the right track. So over the past couple of days, there have been a number of examples of how C4 eCraft is developing tools and approaches that could generate evidence to support improved governance of these landscapes. In particular, I think some concepts approaches that we have been debating like options by context, multi stakeholder processes, and integrated landscape management offer much promise for addressing these challenges. The presentations and commentary we're about to hear should set a stage for an interesting discussion of the ways forward. Thank you.