Good governance means that decisions are made in a manner that is just and fair to everybody who has a stake in how forests are managed. It means that decision-making processes are transparent and decision-makers are held to account. The research conducted under CIFOR's Forests and Governance Programme seeks to enhance the capacity of forest-dwelling communities, and excluded groups such as the poor and women, to participate in decision-making. It promotes greater social and environmental corporate responsibility in the forestry sector, and it supports the transformation of national and local government policies so that they promote effective and fair forest management.

Illegal logging has been a perennial preoccupation for many CIFOR scientists, and a new book - Illegal logging: Law Enforcement, Livelihoods and the Timber Trade - provides a comprehensive analysis of this important issue. It shows that tackling illegal logging is about far more than improving law enforcement; it requires a thorough understanding of the underlying causes which encourage individuals and companies to harvest and trade timber illegally. The authors suggest that if developed countries were to pay developing countries to conserve their forests as a way of reducing carbon emissions - a proposal is now firmly on the climate-change agenda - such payments could provide an important incentive to control illegal logging.

This year also saw the publication of a major policy paper, Forests in Post-conflict Democratic Republic of Congo, coordinated by the World Bank, CIFOR and the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD). The paper analyses the current state of DRC's forests and suggests how the Congolese government could reform its forestry sector, to the benefit of both people and forests. CIFOR's research undoubtedly helped to shape the thinking of the World Bank, a major donor to DRC.

Another feature in this section describes the results of a decade of research by CIFOR scientists and their partners in the Malinau Research Forest, in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan. Managing Forest Resources in a Decentralized Environment is a celebration of the multidisciplinary nature of CIFOR's research, and this story could just as easily have gone under the Environmental Services or Livelihoods Programmes.