Co-Chairs’ Summary : Fifth Dialogue on ILCF - “Investors” Dialogue

The Forests Dialogue (TFD) held a two-day multi-stakeholder dialogue on Investing in Locally Controlled Forestry (ILCF) in London on 24–25 May, 2010. This dialogue was the fifth in this Initiative, which began with a scoping dialogue in Brussels in 2009, followed by field dialogues in Panama, Nepal, and Macedonia, each of which explored the opportunities and challenges facing both local forestry users and enterprises and those interested in investing in them.

This dialogue represented an important chance for the ‘value propositions’ of locally controlled forestry to be explored by investors. It brought together forty stakeholders from key parts of the forest sector internationally, including family forest owners, representatives of Indigenous Peoples and community forestry groups, forestry investors and consultants, forestry companies, development assistance agencies and international non-governmental organizations (see participants list). The aim of the dialogue was to bridge some gaps of understanding—between forest rights holders on the one hand and those who might wish to invest in their locally controlled forestry enterprises on the other—and to identify some clear next steps for stakeholders at local, national and international levels.

The dialogue was facilitated by Markku Simula, fuelled by a background paper by Dominic Elson, and hosted by the London office of PricewaterhouseCoopers, with support from Growing Forest Partnerships (a collaboration of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the World Bank).