Digital technologies are transforming supply chain management by enabling greater connectivity, transparency, and coordination among supply chain partners. In forestry supply chains, characterized by dispersed resources, multiple stakeholders, and complex operational processes, collaborative governance has become increasingly important for improving coordination and sustainable resource management. However, existing studies mainly focus on operational optimization and digital applications, while the governance implications of digital technologies remain insufficiently explored. This conceptual article explores how digital technologies may enable collaborative governance capability in forestry supply chains through four governance mechanisms: information sharing, resource integration, collaborative decision-making, and adaptive governance. Based on collaborative governance and digital transformation literature, a conceptual framework is proposed to illustrate how digital technologies may support governance processes through the Internet of Things, big data analytics, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. The article provides theoretical insights into digital-enabled collaborative governance and practical implications for sustainable forestry supply chains.
Restoring forests is essential to addressing the global crisis of deforestation and biodiversity, as well as to maintaining the livelihoods of billions of forest-dependent people. Three major improvements are introduced by the suggested framework for smart forest restoration management: decentralized financial integration, community participatory governance, and the cost-effective deployment of blockchain and smart contracts for predictive and adaptive management. By coordinating ecological objectives with technological developments, these innovations seek to improve transparency, scalability, management effectiveness, and stakeholder trust in forest restoration initiatives.
The accelerating biodiversity crisis has prompted a paradigm shift in the financial sector, where integrating nature into financial risk assessment is becoming increasingly vital. This study conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to explore the intellectual landscape of biodiversity finance, focusing on how biodiversity is being incorporated into financial theory, investment practices, and sustainability governance. Using the Scopus database and VOSviewer software, the study analyzes co-occurrence networks, temporal trends, density visualizations, and collaboration patterns among authors, institutions, and countries. The findings reveal that ābiodiversity,ā āfinance,ā and āsustainable financeā serve as conceptual anchors, while emerging themes such as ādecentralized finance,ā āgreen bonds,ā and āESGā indicate growing innovation in the field. The United Kingdom and United States lead global collaborations, with strong linkages to European and Asian institutions. This research contributes theoretically by clarifying the fieldās multidimensional evolution and practically by identifying knowledge gaps and strategic entry points for policy, investment, and academic advancement. Limitations include database coverage and lack of qualitative content analysis, suggesting future research directions. Overall, the study underscores the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing biodiversity-aligned financial systems.
Open access
Environmental Conservation and Management
Forest Management and Policy
Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
This study investigates the evolving landscape of scholarly research on nature finance and the financialization of biodiversity through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of literature indexed in Scopus from 2000 to 2025. Using VOSviewer, we mapped co-occurring keywords, author networks, temporal trends, and country collaborations to identify dominant themes, emerging topics, and influential contributors. The findings reveal a conceptual transition from traditional ecosystem service valuation toward market-based conservation instruments, including conservation finance, carbon markets, and blockchain-based solutions. The thematic clusters emphasize the increasing intersection between finance, sustainability, and biodiversity policy, with recent trends showing a surge in decentralized finance applications for environmental assets. Notably, the United Kingdom and United States dominate collaborative networks, while Asia-Pacific regions exhibit growing engagement in the field. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of biodiversity financialization and offers practical insights for policymakers, financial institutions, and environmental stakeholders aiming to design inclusive and effective biodiversity finance strategies. It also identifies gaps for future interdisciplinary research that bridges ecological science with financial innovation.
Open access
Forest Management and Policy
Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
Abstract This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joinedāup transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multiādonor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include crossāreferencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the āpenalty defaultā effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joinedāup transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.
Do-hun Kim, Dong-Hwan Kim, DongāHo Lee, Sunjoo Park Ā· 5 authors
With the institutionalization of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+), the global REDD+ financial network has been formed to support the implementation of REDD+ in developing countries. Although the rapid expansion of the network made it decentralized, it is still a highly centralized network in terms of the distribution of financial resources, revolving around only a few major actors. While the source of financing was diversified due to an increase in influential donors, the majority of financing still came from a few constant major donors, and a few constant major developing countries received most of the financial support. Although increases in donor numbers and the amount of finance received can provide more chances to support developing countries, it may cause inefficiency due to overlaps and duplications. Also, over-centralization of financial resources can be ineffective in terms of achieving maximum greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, and can broaden gaps between developing countriesā ability to cope with climate change and deforestation. Lack of coordination among donors and the differing capacity of developing countries may have caused centralization of financial resources in the global REDD+ financial network. To minimize this problem, a comprehensive monitoring system and platforms for information sharing are needed.
Open access
Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
Nelson Turyahabwe, C. J. Geldenhuys, Stephen Watts, A.Y. Banana
Uganda is one of the sub-Saharan African countries that has devolved the management of forest resources. Meaningful devolution, however, requires that local governments and other community organizations should have capacity in terms of adequate and competent human resources, finance, information, skills, and the appropriate legal framework to effectively deliver services. This paper examines the technical and institutional capacity in selected local organisations to manage decentralised forest resources in Uganda. We found that technical and institutional capacity to implement decentralised forest governance exists in local organisations through partnerships with other actors in the productive use of the available resources. Local organisations mobilised and managed human, physical and financial resources for decentralized forest management. They also demonstrated the capacity to make and implement integrated plans and budgets and formulated byelaws regulating forest use. Our findings, however, revealed that none of the organisations had either the legal mandate or sufficient human and physical resources to govern forest resources unilaterally due to inadequate devolution of decision-making powers and inadequate fiscal support from the central government. The findings suggest a need for local organisations to recruit more technical staff, strengthen internal sources of revenue and networking amongst organisations both at local and national government levels for effective management of decentralised forest resources.
Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
Political principles for forest policy in the Mediterranean Region are analysed individually, considering their strengths and weaknesses, and are illustrated through encouraging examples and opportunities for development. The identified principles include: national sovereignty; decentralization; governance by contract; enforcement; capacity building; sustainable finance; minority protection (indigenous and local people); secure ownership rights (land tenure); equity; separation of powers; accountability; participation and partnership, transparency; iterative, audit and monitored; long-term commitment; holistic; consistency with international commitments; intersectoral coordination, consistency and synergies with other policies; integration with sustainable development policies; research and technology based; and conflict resolution.