Enabling Solutions for Small-Scale Forests and Communities
To overcome barriers faced by small-scale and community forests, various efforts have been made. FSC is reviewing and simplifying its normative framework. This is an important contribution, but it is widely recognized that this will not be enough to make FSC certification more attractive for small-scale and community forestry. To add value to FSC certification, FSC has developed market access plans for several FSC certified forest operations. However, it became clear that a large number of different disabling conditions in each case made it difficult to implement these projects with an individual value chain approach. So now, we are looking to the collective impact model as well as ongoing value chain approach efforts to support market access.
Community and Family Forests Program
Co-Creating Collective Benefits
Through our work with small-scale and community forests we have learned that we need to embrace complexity and find ways for producing enabling market conditions. A proven way of finding mutually beneficial, or collective, benefits is the collective impact model. Collective impact is a proven model, initially devised by the Kennedy School at Harvard and published by Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2011. It proposes the joint commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific problem with relevant social dimensions. In order for the commitment to be successfully achieved, five criteria must be secured:
So, rather than focus efforts on local value chain strategies, the adoption of collective impact would seek a process grounded in a systemic approach.
We have been implementing this model in three separate countries in Latin America. Read the updates in the briefing note to learn more and understand our goals for pursuing the collective impact approach.