Learning Forest Devolution: An Assessment Tool Developed in Vietnam for Forest Departments

Devolution poses serious challenges to forest departments as it radically transforms their dealings with local people. Forest departments need to develop mechanisms for monitoring, analyzing, and adapting devolution policies in a timely and efficient manner. This paper discusses a tool developed in Vietnam for assessing local outcomes of devolution. The paper describes the social and analytical processes underlying the collaborative development of the assessment tool. Results from its application in ten villages in Dak Lak province suggest that the tool provides an effective and feasible way for forest departments to generate relevant information about local outcomes of forest devolution. Assessments such as the one in Dak Lak can make important contributions to learning-oriented approaches to forest devolution.