A Consultation: 1 October - 30 November 2007

In pursuing its Forest Strategy (2002), the World Bank is proposing a new Global Forest Partnership to bring together many organizations for greatly accelerating progress in managing forests, in ways that better meet social, environmental and economic needs.  Its focus would be on joint action with developing countries. 

The Bank is looking for feedback and ideas on this proposal from a wide range of different stakeholders before deciding how best to proceed.  It has asked the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to carry out an independent assessment and to do this we need your views.

The Idea

The idea is for a new inclusive partnership involving multiple partners - to include international and national NGOs, indigenous groups, ODA donors, philanthropic foundations, financial institutions, the private sector, the research community, international bodies including members of the Bank's existing forest programmes. 

It is hoped that the partnership will encompass a wide range of activity-knowledge generation, cross country sharing of knowledge and experience, capacity building, technical assistance, mainstreaming policy and financial innovations across forest livelihoods, forest markets and forest-based environmental services. 

Possible Benefits

A Global Forest Partnership could bring a number of interesting benefits:

• Enabling conditions for partners' initiatives in forestry, carbon, poverty etc. by pooling partner organizations’ resources to raise the profile of forests

• Improved availability of financial resources - helping donors match their contributions with country needs, pooling and coordinating World Bank Group and ODA resources, reducing transaction costs leveraging both public and private sector investment and delivering new financial instruments

• Empowered communities and smallholders - through capacity development, improving their negotiating position, and access to markets and innovating financing mechanisms like avoided deforestation payments

• Effective implementation of national policy and programmes by building cross sector support for forest and integrating forestry into Poverty Reduction Strategies and strengthening civil society and investor participation.

Join the Debate

IIED has developed 15 key questions, which can be answered directly online at http://www.iiedgfpconsultation.org or downloaded and submitted by email or post.  Documentation is available in English French and Spanish. Responses are requested by 30 November 2007.