**1. Introduction**

202 Sustainable Forest Management – Case Studies

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The forests of Vietnam provide a high conservation value considering habitat diversity despite massive forest destruction within the last decades (World Bank, 2010). Following recent studies Vietnam is one of the 34 biodiversity hotspots in the world (Indo-Burma hotspot) (Myers et al., 2000; Brooks et al., 2002; World Bank, 2010; Werger and Nghia, 2006), but at the same time one out of eight tropical forest hotspots which will lose the largest number of species by cause of deforestation (Brooks et al., 2002). The impacts of the forest environment – and its ongoing degradation – on local socio-economic factors cannot be neglected. Actually, Vietnam has been defined as an archetypal case for a positive correlation between a high forest cover and a high poverty rate combined with a low poverty density (Sunderlin et al., 2007). In other words, regions with high forest cover are often sparsely populated but after all are among the poorest of the country. Forests are populated by the poor, but it is nowadays also an evidence that it is the poorest households which generally depend more on forests (Cavendish, 2003; Wunder, 2001), deriving several goods, income and services from them (Arnold, 2001; Dubois, 2002).

Human and ecological factors in Vietnam make it a candidate for the implementation of sustainable forest management (SFM) with the objective of win / win solutions for both human well-being as well as forest ecosystems (Sunderlin and Ba, 2005). The recently implemented forest management types defined by the government had to face wide criticism concerning their success in reaching such win / win objectives, such as the existing gap between state intentions and local applications of policies, the poor involvement of households in the forestry sector and their insufficient payment for protection activities, or the disturbance of traditional land-use systems (Clement and Amezaga, 2008; Boissière et al., 2009; Sunderlin and Ba, 2005; Wunder et al. 2005). In the course of national decentralisation processes the former state organised forest enterprises were fragmented and land / forest was reallocated to communities and private stakeholders. It is essential to record and compare the different stakeholder perceptions concerning SFM to elaborate adequate criteria and indicator (C&I) sets to be able to

Setting Up Locally Appropriate Ecological Criteria and Indicators to

Dinh Hoa District, and the differences between the sets were analyzed.

**2.2 Set development** 

**Villages** 


**Local Perception**  PRA, "Bottom-up"


Evaluate Sustainable Forest Management in Dinh Hoa District (Northern Vietnam) 205

Criteria and Indicator sets were built up through three workshops with forest management experts (top-down method where a generic set was modified using multi-criteria decision making) and group discussions with 12 local villages (bottom-up method where sets were elaborated from local visions) (Fig. 1), resulting in 6 criteria and 27 indicator (see Tab. 3a and 3b). These sets were then compared and compiled to a final set for all forest use types of the

> **Dinh Hoa (District Level)**  - Local governments


**Xuan Mai (National** 

**Thai Nguyen (Province Level)**  - Scientists and students


government officials


**Level)**  - Scientists,

**Expert Perception**  Workshops, "Top-down"

Fig. 1. Conceptual Framework of Dinh Hoa forests. The figure displays the connections of the forest concerned stakeholders to each other and towards the forest. The Bottom-up approach was implemented in twelve villages from five communes, meaning four villages

implemented through three workshops at national, provincial and district level. 1 and 1', 2

from two different communes per forest use type. The Top-down approach was

and 2', etc.: two villages belonging to the same commune.

measure the sustainability of current forest management regimes (Karjala et al., 2004; Sherry et al., 2005; Ritchie et al., 2000).

The national Vietnamese set, based on Forest Stewardship Council standards, has not been finalized and accepted yet because of the lack of local consultation (anonymous personal communication). The mostly used sets, based on expert consultations, give results which often differ from local needs (Pokharel and Larsen, 2007; Purnomo et al., 2005; Adam and Kneeshaw, 2008; Sherry et al., 2005). By experience the ecological elements demonstrated the highest similarity among C&I frameworks (Purnomo et al., 2005; Sherry et al., 2005; Adam and Kneeshaw, 2008). It has still to be tested how far local perceptions differ from institutional ecological C&I sets in the case of Dinh Hoa, and how far they differ among different local communities depending on different forest management types. Accordingly an ecological C&I template that is appropriate to Dinh Hoa District for SFM assessment was set up, by:

