Governance of forests: Regional institutions in East Asia

All forestry should be social in the sense that trees render valuable services to every form of society (Westoby 1989: 217). But given the global connectedness of human society and forests, forestry should also have a global or international perspective. One of the most important contemporary environmental challenges of our time is that forestry involves systems that are intrinsically global such as climate change or are tightly linked to global pressures, for example timber production for the world market, and that require governance at levels from the global to the local (Dietz et al. 2003).