The analysis of the forest policy tools

The success of a policy tool to achieve the desired behaviour depends not only on the characteristics of the forest benefits, such as rivalry and excludability, but also on the socio-economic conditions of the target population. As mentioned earlier, forest owners in Yen Bai province, in particular, and in Vietnam, in general, are perceived as poor and less educated people. They depend on their forests as a major source of livelihood and have limited access to modern technology, machines and facilities. They often live in mountainous areas where poor infrastructure impedes their contact with other people inside and outside the region. Hence, choosing an appropriate policy tool must take into account these conditions. This section discusses the policy tools most suitable to enhance biodiversity in planted forests in Vietnam.

As discussed, regulations would be most suitable when there is high risk associated with certain behaviours (e.g. timber harvesting in endangered species habitat) or when the behaviour is of high importance (e.g. reforestation policies) or when it is public land (Guldin, 2003; Janota & Broussard, 2008; Sterner, 2003). Regulations may be not suitable to apply to extending rotation age in households’ planted forests in Vietnam for two main reasons. The first reason is that regulations can suffer from poor enforcement, especially where governance and state institutions are weak, in developing countries (Engel, Pagiola, & Wunder, 2008; Forneri, Blaser, Jotzo, & Robledo, 2006). The Vietnamese Government has difficulties in controlling logging even on state forest lands, with 12% of households committing illegal logging in Vietnam (McElwee, 2004). Thus, it is unlikely that the government will succeed in controlling logging on private lands.

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The second reason is that the success of regulations worldwide positively correlates with income per capita (Dasgupta, et al., 2001), but forest owners in Yen Bai province are poor. For poor communities, imposing restrictions on their use of forest resources can create economic hardship and may induce social conflict (Bulte & Engel, 2006). In addition, the survey results show that some forest owners may harvest sooner than the time committed to (in a carbon pooling arrangement) because they are poor. Hence, for the reasons presented, regulations may fail to force the target population to lengthen timber rotation ages.

Taxes to lengthen rotation age and biodiversity offsets are not appropriate tools to enhance biodiversity in the situation here. Since forest owners are very poor and their profit from the sale of timber may not even be enough for their daily basic needs, taxes would increase their financial burden. With respect to biodiversity offsets, planted forests possess less biodiversity than natural forests or protected areas, but richer biodiversity than any other types of land uses. Thus, biodiversity offsets would be suitable tools if the land cleared for planting trees was a protected area or a natural forest. Otherwise, biodiversity offsets are not appropriate tools.

Education tools while having positive effects on encouraging forest owners to apply sustainable harvesting practices are likely to be weak policy tools in this situation. As mentioned, forest owners here are very poor, they harvest the trees at 5 years to pay for their daily basic needs. Even though they know that delaying harvest will bring about higher profit in the future as well as environmental benefits, they cannot afford to delay harvest.

Forest certifications targeting at biodiversity conservation would be a good policy tool to be employed in the future because it brings higher timber price with an expanding market. Forest certifications can also help to create environmental friendly timber products. However, there are many procedures involved and it is

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costly for forest household owners to get their forests certified (Durst, McKenzie, Brown, & Appanah, 2006).

Bird and butterfly farming would be a good idea to enhance biodiversity while creating jobs and also combating poverty. In this case, bird farming (an artificial way to increase the number of birds) in planted forests would help to increase biodiversity without having to lengthen a rotation age (a natural way to increase the number of birds). The issues, however, are to train farmers to raise birds and butterflies, which can take a lot of time and money. Moreover, a market for butterfly products also needs to be established. If ecotourism is chosen as a market for bird farming, then tourist areas need to be established as well. These issues cannot be addressed overnight and there is a difficulty in applying this on a large scale (for example, at a province or a state level). As discussed in section 2.4.9, butterfly farming and ecotourism are often funded by the international organizations because they are usually established in a protected area or a natural forest. In this case, however, planted forests are not biodiversity hotspots, and hence will pose more difficulty in attracting funding from international organizations for conducting butterfly farming and ecotourism.

Given the poverty of forest owners and the direct effect on biodiversity of direct payments, a more suitable approach is to pay forest owners for lengthening rotation ages. Biodiversity conservation needs to be established through “tangible incentives, not through wishful thinking that poor people will make substantial sacrifices in the short term for uncertain future rewards or for the benefit to the whole national or global community” (Ferraro & Kiss, 2003). Lower income people may favour monetary incentive tools, as their financial status may be prohibitive to otherwise engaging in forest conservation practices (Schaaf & Broussard, 2006).

When economic factors are key determinants of decisions, influencing those behaviours requires activities that change the underlying economic benefits, such

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as changes in economic incentives (Byers, 2000). The survey in Yen Bai province shows that family financial status of the forest owners, i.e. poor, is one of the main reasons to harvest trees sooner. Hence, providing the forest owners with monetary incentives can change their harvesting decisions, i.e. delaying harvest. The survey also shows that almost all the forest owners would agree to lengthen rotation ages if they were supported financially (section 4.2.3).