25 Years of Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management: Why Some Intergovernmental C&I Processes Flourished While Others Faded

The use of criteria and indicators (C&I) for data collection, monitoring, assessing and reporting on sustainable forest management (SFM) has been growing since the Earth Summit in 1992, supported by eleven intergovernmental, regional and international forest-related C&I processes. The initial effort led to varying levels of implementation across countries. Several processes never went much beyond the adoption of a first set of C&I while others have made substantial progress. In recent years, interest in C&I for SFM has again increased. In light of the Sustainable Development Goals and emerging global challenges the contribution of C&I to monitor, assess and report on forest conditions and trends is increasingly important. We compare and analyse the structure, activities and progress of the intergovernmental C&I processes. The work is based on document analysis and questionnaires sent to the secretariats of the processes and C&I experts. We found many similarities but also major differences in the structure and content of the C&I sets. The results provide a context for discussing and understanding why some of the C&I processes are successful in their work while others have stalled. Finally, we propose the required ingredients for success for the future activities of the forest-related intergovernmental C&I processes.