Project information

The “Illegal or Incompatible? Project (2008 – 2010) is part of the Wageningen University & Research Centre and DGIS Partnership with the objective to support good governance to manage the consequences of VPA legal timber legality standards on local livelihoods and to strengthen the capacity of actors to (re)negotiate institutional arrangements for sustainable resource use in Ghana and Indonesia.

The project is primarely a research project exploring current and potential governance mechanisms (in Ghana and Indonesia) that hamper or support the inclusion of livelihood considerations in the implementation of international trade protocols such as the EU/Ghana Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) related to the export of legal timber to EU markets. The VPA initiative has been launched by the EU to counteract the export of illegally sourced timber from producing countries such as Ghana and Indonesia

The EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT)/VPA initiative on trade in legal timber is the most significant international initiative in forestry reform in many years. It has, however, one weakness. Success requires that the EU negotiators move beyond trade negotiations and at least table the wide social and environmental issues around forestry. A particular problem in the FLEGT process is that the legal framework governing the forest sector is often anti-poor in its conception and operation. National level concerns tend to focus on concession forestry’s long term sustainability, conservation issues and (international) trade, while local community concerns are seen as merely subsistence based. This not only affects local economic development efforts, upholding national laws threatens to compound existing power imbalances. Consequently, there is no guarantee that strengthened law enforcement will improve the welfare of the poor. The challenge in addressing these conflicting claims on the resource base lies in linking law enforcement in timber production with pro-poor reform, and in the institutional mechanisms to achieve this (Adrian Wells, 2006). For VPAs to be effective improved governance is a core issue.

We would like the VPAs to be instruments to: “strengthen land tenure and access rights especially for marginalised communities, strengthen effective participation of all stakeholders, notably on non-state actors and indigenous peoples in policy making, increase transparency and reduce corruption”.

A very important question which, so far, has not been a central consideration in FLEGT processes therefore is: how will the VPA process of "tightening of controls" affect the lives of rural communities, especially those dependent on timber extraction and trade for their livelihoods (Colchester, 2006)?

The "Illegal or Incompatible?" project addresses this questions and assumes that with appropriate governance mechanisms in place, livelihood considerations can be positively impacted upon during VPA implementation: compatible and legal!  

Project documentation can be downloaded below: