 This story begins and ends with the development of the European Union's program for Forest Law Enforcement Development and Trade, also known as FLEGTI. And just to give a little bit of background so that everyone's on the same page, FLEGTI is mainly composed of three instruments. There's the voluntary partnership agreement, which is basically a trade treaty between European Union and partner timber-producing countries. There's the European, the EU Timber Regulation, which was implemented in 2013. And that effectively bans the imports of illegal timber from around the world into the EU and requires due diligence on the part of all timber importers to know where and how their timber was sourced and how it was traded. And finally there's something called the VPA license, the voluntary partnership agreement license, which is a mechanism developed at the national level in VPA partner countries, timber-producing countries, that basically attests to the legality of timber that is exported from those countries to the EU. And for a number of years prior to all of this and still ongoing, C4 colleagues have been studying small-scale domestic timber markets around the world and the economic and the environmental aspects of those markets. Small-scale timber markets in developing countries especially, but also around the world are often unregulated. They've operated traditionally in legal gray areas or under customary systems of access and trade. And they're important to the livelihoods of millions of people in tropical timber-producing countries. Now it's true that some timber, and in some cases even a lot of timber from small-scale domestic markets, finds its way into the international market. In some countries, for example, mainland Chinese buyers are particularly active in accessing those domestic markets and exporting timber internationally. But for this reason, in designing the FLEGT system and VPA processes, at some point it became a priority to include small-scale domestic timber markets within VPA agreements. And that effectively requires that at the national level, timber-producing countries can verify the legality of all the timber traded domestically, not only exported to the EU and other places. And this is relevant in five out of six of the countries that have signed VPA so far, including Indonesia and four countries, or two countries in West Africa and two countries in Central Africa. And there are a number of other countries that are currently still in the negotiation process, and in which this particular aspect of the VPA may become relevant in the future. And so to understand the potential advantages and some of the drawbacks of this effective formalization process of mostly informal or customary timber markets, we commissioned case studies on formalization more generally across different sectors, including formalization processes over land, land tenure. For the reason that land tenure is the foundation of resource access for all land-based resources, and also other sectors such as mining, fisheries, and non-timber forest products. And this led eventually to the publication of this special issue, which I take the opportunity of announcing today, published in Society of Natural Resources May in May this year. And I want to just bring a few insights from that special issue. Starting with, I think, just a quick definition of formalization, the authors of the special issue took formalization to mean inscription of practices and behaviors in legal codes, national legal codes, generally by the state, by state legislature or law-making bodies. And to understand formalization, you first need to understand what the informal sector is. And that term became common, especially starting in the 1970s, and was adopted by, initially, by the International Labor Organization. In their work to, first of all, understand how important under the radar unregulated economic activity is to poor people, mostly in cities and urban areas in developing countries. And later it's become a subject for study in natural resource sectors as well. And a lot of initial work was done on how to make the informal sector more profitable to protect the informal sector and its values so that it could continue contributing to poverty alleviation. And in some cases that meant granting legal rights, so codifying or formalizing legal rights of ownership and access to land and other processes of business and trade. Formalization has also been used increasingly for environmental purposes to prevent unregulated extraction of natural resources that have undesirable environmental effects. And also for conflict prevention, as in the case of conflict minerals in some countries in Central Africa, West Africa, and Southern Africa, most notably. But it's important to note that implementation or sort of institution and implementation does not necessarily equal adoption. There are different theories about how people take on new policies and make them work on the ground based on their own values, beliefs and norms. But from the studies that we've done, we can say that across the board it's very important to know, it's very important who initiates formalization, for whom, for what reason, and the order in which those processes are carried out, so when. So some earlier work by Tor Benjamin's and the human geographer who worked on formalization of land tenure in West Africa made the point that if you're going to formalize land tenure, you want to do it in such a way that local farmers who already are holding land have first dibs on getting title so that people don't come in from outside and grab all the titles and manage to get a hold of all the land that the policies, you know, the policy is targeting development for poor people, so you don't want to have the most privileged people in the area come in and take advantage of those policies first, so timing is really important. It's also important to know whether policies are coming, are designed and implemented from the top down or from the bottom up. One of the authors in this issue, David McGrath, led a study on fisheries in Brazil and he described how the process was largely initiated by local people who wanted more sustainable management of their resources and notably wanted to keep outsiders from coming in and taking their fish, so they pushed a lot and pushed the state to implement policies and to tie those policies into systems of social welfare, pension systems, etc. While it's not entirely successful in large part due to the complexity of governing access in this complex environment, there's at least a fair amount of local buy-in and support. But a number of the other case studies bring lessons about how top-down policies can sometimes go astray and it's important to look at these and to try to predict when these things might happen or to avoid these potential negative effects. One of them is that when the new policy comes in and before it's actually implemented, you can have something called a race for the resource when everybody rushes in to try to get as much as they can before the policy is actually enforced and then you have increased environmental damage during that period. Another real danger is the criminalization of people who are already, who have been active in the sector for a very long time and have established practices and depend on these sectors for their livelihoods. This is something that was seen in a case on mining in Zimbabwe where policies changed back and forth and eventually a lot of people ended up in jail who had formerly been targeted for poverty alleviation programs in the mining sector. Another very common case is elite capture which is when, as mentioned in the case of land, to avoid when local social groups with more power managed to take advantage of the existing of the new policy to gain control of resources. This is the case that was described in the timber sector in Indonesia in our set of studies and also often there are very powerful criminal networks that are able to take advantage of the system and sort of avoid enforcement while local resource owners are pushed out of the market. And finally, in a case of application of higher level policies over many countries, there's a danger of leakage of the unintended or the negative effects from one country to another. So this was something described in the case, in the southern African case on natural non-timber forest products where very lucrative products could be accessed in one country, in more than one country. So implementation of a more restrictive policy in one country would result in over-extraction in another neighboring country. So what to do about all this? Just to give an example, one of our leading experts on Indonesian timber policy, Kristoff Ovidzinski, is working in East Kalimantan at a lower political scale to try to understand how with under the Indonesian VPA more local level rules need to be worked out. Because often the problem is that rules are initially applied at a very high level and are not necessarily relevant or useful to local people. So he and his colleagues are working in East Kalimantan to understand how rules could be developed that allow for small-scale logging and small-scale trading in timber for local markets. And at a more general level, we make a broad recommendation that in reviewing the work that's already been done under the FLEG-TVPA process, that the efforts make more of an effort to understand local and customary institutions when looking at how to regulate domestic timber access and trade. These have largely been overlooked so far because they, on the surface, are quite complicated, too hard to understand at the national or international level. But it's still very important if you want these things to work. And finally, we recommend that after post-VPA, after this whole process is over, that the implementers, especially the EC, think about how to implement a user-accountable monitoring system so to understand the effects after the policies are implemented. And not just the effects on timber and the timber trade and whether less illegal timber is entering the EU, but on how local institutions are responding to the international policies and the national rules and how local customary users are experiencing change in the economic sectors on which they depend for their livelihoods. So meanwhile, we're working to get the word out. And I want to thank you all for coming to listen to this brief talk today. Thank you. Thanks, Louis. That was great. And of course, I'm sure there's going to be lots of questions. Do you want to feed them or should I field them? You can. All right. Robert? Maybe it's just a really little tiny point, but your very last one, you were saying that among your recommendations was that after the VPA process was complete, you would like to encourage the EU to implement, if I got this right, a user implemented monitoring system. Could you clarify a little because I thought the VPA was a monitoring system of sorts? Well, the VPA is a system for assuring timber legality. So there is a requirement to monitor access and trade in timber. By user accountable monitoring system, I meant more of a monitoring system that also looks at the social effects of the VPAs as well as the environmental outcomes. And this is drawing from recommendations made by Eleanor Ostrom in 1999 in her design principles on sustainable management and sustainable governance of the commons. So the idea is that over time, you need to have systems that are accountable to the users of the resources and also preferably involve those represented as those users or community groups in monitoring processes. Thanks, Louis. Kind of following up on that, I'm wondering, are there any social safeguards or even kind of socially oriented or equity oriented principles integrated into the VPA? I'm thinking akin to what we've seen emerge from the red plus sector. You know, very much so. And the most obvious level at which that is the case is that most of the national forestry laws, all of the national forestry laws in the countries that have signed VPAs contain social safeguards. So the first level of application is at the most simplest level that all logging and trade in timber has to respect national laws, which generally have fairly well articulated social safeguards whether or not those are implemented to the point where they actually help people. But I just want to read one more quote from the EC because in 2012, they issued a publication on this whole process and they said that forests are a component of a system along with people, their institutions and policies, climate markets and a host of other variables. When one component of the system is changed, the full effect is mainly unforeseen and there are significant impacts on other parts of the system. So all of the work that we did both reinforces that and further sort of describes that the complicated nature of this and the interactions between the legal systems and social welfare. Hi, Louis. Hi. I want to go to one of the other recommendations you made which was trying to understand more the local context. Can you just give an example of how that would have helped? Because you also mentioned it's really difficult, it might be, you know, might be difficult to start, but maybe an example of how that can be useful. Well, to some degree I think it's self-obvious that in places where resource access and trade have been largely unregulated but very busy that in codifying rules you would need to understand those existing practices and how they're set up and how people interact with each other, what kinds of social structures, local social structures are there that govern who gets to go where and take what. And there are such systems everywhere we work in tropical forest areas at lower levels than even local district county level. And initially when the process of designing the EPAs was going on there was a plan to review all existing relevant national policies and laws governing forests, including customary laws. And in the process of those reviews were done but in the process they didn't manage to get to customary. And, you know, one of the reasons for that is probably that customary law is highly variable from place to place so when you're working between the international level and the national level it's not such an easy thing to address customary laws which could be very local and there can be hundreds of different systems in a given country. So how do you, this is where you get into the questions of how do you implement an international regime while integrating bottom up processes. And that's a challenge that hasn't been worked out very well so far. Thank you for a very interesting talk. I was wondering whether any of the case studies had looked at the impacts of governmental decentralization and whether that has any correlation with a more egalitarian or more sensitive approach to VPA. Not necessarily decentralized natural resource management. Particularly the case on Zimbabwe focused, you know, discussed decentralization. This was by Sam Spiegel who's both an Indonesianist and an expert in small-scale mining and also works a lot in Southern Africa. He described a process of decentralization followed by a process of decentralization in which the decentralization largely was seen as beneficial to the small-scale mining communities that were the targets of international development agencies at that time. And the formalization of their rights prior to the decentralization in the 2000s was seen very favorably by international development institutions. People did well out of it. They were better off. But that was followed by a wave of decentralization. And, you know, these decentralization can also be stimulated by global institutional development processes. So if you want to better regulate a sector, such as the timber sector or you want to prevent illegality, et cetera, sometimes the first thing that happens is actually a big decentralization. To some extent that's also a potential outcome of the flag TVPA process. So in the case of mining, that decentralization resulted in what I mentioned during the talk, a huge wave of criminalization of small-scale actors who formerly were sort of the beneficiaries of national decentralization policies. If I may add to that, in my work, too, it's like the decentralization policies in Columbia of large scale in an area led to a massive influx of the state. And the legalization of land title was followed pretty much immediately by the entry of lots of illegal and paralegal actors. So what was supposed to be a poverty alleviation development strategy through formal, you know, land tenure led to massive displacement and illegal actors and the state paradoxically being deeply entrenched in a region. Thank you. I think I would like to add some comments in particular your statements. I think the common problem is when we are translating the international idea into local context, then we will find some aspects. I would like to give example from the timber certification cases. For example, in Indonesia, my study found that only small amount of certified timber that can be entered into European market, but still maybe about 90 percent or more still can find another market. So that's one point. And the other point, most of the timber that comply with the certification, in fact, there are the plants coming from small holders, which is not really relevant with illegality. So I think that's the second true back. So I think we need to address this kind of issues when we are trying to broad the broader scale of these ideas, but we have to be careful because it will provide a lot of incentive, disincentive to small holders. Thank you. I totally agree. Thank you for a very interesting talk. Not a question, just a general comment. I think it seems to me that these lessons from formalization and in these different sectors that you describe in the special issue, it seems to me that this is of particular value, I think, right now if we look for changes that are happening in other sectors, we didn't consider, for example, oil palm in our special issue, but it seems to me that these lessons with formalizing timber and other things of particular relevance to the challenges with formalizing that, for example, oil palm is going to face as this idea of zero deforestation and so on kind of puts a root in the sector. So it seems to me that your special issue has a lot to contribute in that area. I don't know if you want to comment on that. Well, our special issue, and I think your comment is quite relevant. I mean, this is just the beginning. There's a lot more work that can be done. Let's do another one. It's a matter of term or terminology you describe very well about formalization. I have difficulty in understanding the term socialization. Is it going to be a formal academic term? I heard it overspoken from time to time in many different events, especially in Indonesia. Thanks. I didn't use that term, but I'll venture to say that it has to do with vulgarization, popularization, rolling out, upscaling on what those are potential definitions of that I would imagine. So is that the context in which it's being used in the case of... It does belong to something like... Well, I think that you can use the term socialization for what it means in face value. And to me it would mean popularization generally, rolling out, upscaling. But I suppose that there are many different potential definitions. I don't think it's completely... It's not uncommon. We didn't use it. I just had a background question. So how important is the EC for the market in these countries? And it seemed to me that you were also insinuating that perhaps they had an influence on national policies as well. Was that really the case? Is the concern how to incorporate small holders or how to ensure that small holders benefit? Or are there like what Padaday said, there are other markets that they can still be absorbed in? How important of a player is the EC? Okay, well that's the first question. It's an important player in the world timber markets and markets for all natural resources. It's a big...EU is a big consumer. Now one of the questions has been, if other major markets do not comply in a similar way to a comparable system, then how much does it matter? But some of those other markets for example include China, which also exports a lot of the timber that they import in the form of final products to the EU. So overall it's an important segment of the global market. So it does matter to timber producing countries what the EU does in terms of regulating its own imports. Now when it comes to how the VPA process...whether the VPA process affects domestic timber policy, absolutely if it's implemented as promised, it requires designing whole new systems of timber legality verification or at least adapting or proving existing systems of timber legality verification. And as regards small scale operated small holders, et cetera, in the case of some countries it requires the formalization of domestic timber market. So it has a big effect on how small holders are able to access the market even within their own country. So it's potentially a very powerful and very important global forest governance and trade regime. I'm going to put in one more question, piggybacking sort of one because but also touching on part of the paper which you haven't spoken about. You were talking about some of the unintended consequences for small holders and I think in some of your other work as well as in this paper you mentioned how these formalization procedures have negative impacts on marginalized communities and on women timber producers. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well there's a specific case in one of the case studies that was done by our southern Africa colleagues where the formalization process of the it was actually the Baobab Bark industry just to give an example which is largely was largely managed and run by women required that producers that traders interact more with law enforcement with officials police and border guards etc. And this put women traders in contact with with male authorities and this was an unintended negative outcome of this was that it became intimidating or dangerous for women to be involved in certain parts of the value chain that they'd been involved with before so they lost out on some some economic I mean there were there's to some degree a major effect on women in that particular sector. Thank you. Well Christine. Thanks I just generally wanted to ask a bit sort of referring to Dede's question how much do you think of the issues the problems also stem from a real lack of knowledge of how many you know what the processes are of production of many of these many of these products whether of timber you know looking at the kinds of things that Peter and other people look at where a lot of timber is actually more of an agricultural product than it is than it is a forest product and I would think in other areas as well that even though there may be such a focus on rights and on legality that essentially we don't understand what the product is at all we don't understand what is you know what we're talking about what this timber is or what these these non-timber products may be or whatever where they're far more planted far more managed far more sort of cultural products and they are natural products do you think that's a broad sort of issue or is that just happening to you one of my obsessions well I think it's a huge issue and I think that a lot of us here are sharing your interest in understanding it and I think that that means that you know what that means is that there's still a huge need for basic research into how local people access and manage resources and what are the very specific processes through which they do that and forestry obviously it requires understanding social organization in local places it requires understanding ecology you know the biological processes whereby small holders or local people in general are able to take advantage of specific ecological niches to sustainably produce timber in a huge range of very specific local ecological niches so yeah I think that that's a very good point and something that we need to do a lot more work on keep doing a lot of work on you know any last question well Louis thank you so much and thank you all for the excellent questions clearly we're not done discussing the topic so we look forward to other science systems and other conversations formally and informally thank you