ABSTRACT
When the world's population was small and forests covered a larger portion of the globe, forest governance was probably not a very significant problem. But with increasing population and increasing consumption of the Earth's resources over the past century, forest governance has become a burning issue. Disputes abound, passions flare, fortunes are won and lost, and wars can even result from issues of forest governance. Partially in response to these problems, a popular move in recent decades has been to decentralize or devolve forest governance from central governments to lower levels of government, to civil society or to private hands (see, for example, Contreras, 2003b; Colfer and Capistrano, 2005; Ribot and Larson, 2005).
