ABSTRACT
Chapters 3 to 9 revealed a broad diversity of environmental, social and economic contexts that shape forestry across 20 case study countries and seven world regions. Variability among extent and condition of forest cover, the distribution of forest ownership, the structure of forest governance, the principal modes of forest production and forest trade, as well as the key threats facing forest conservation, have made scholars of environmental regulation in general, and forest policy in particular, reticent in undertaking global-scale comparisons of environmental performance requirements. Our approach has been the converse: instead of viewing such differences as rendering comparisons meaningless or difficult, we view standardized comparison as all the more important because of contextual diversity, in that it provides a means to uncover themes and patterns as to how and why forest governance arrangements develop and evolve within complex, ‘real life’ settings. This chapter sets the stage for such explanatory analysis through a summary of our core contextual and policy findings. Chapter 11 builds on this effort and sets the stage for future empirically grounded research, by theorizing about how these contextual factors may both explain policy variability and influence policy effectiveness.
