Forestry project management

Abstract

The chapter at hand outlines basic concepts and procedural requirements of forestry project management, i.e., ODA-supported measures in pursuit of forest sector development goals. Since about the mid-1980s forestry projects underwent significant change, shifting from more strictly sectoral and technical foci towards growing recognition of international forest-related policy processes, closer alignment with national development goals and priorities, growing integration of forestry interventions into wider rural development rationales, and greater donor cooperation and harmonization. Along with these trends came growing awareness for the need to reliably monitor the progress of project implementation, and to objectively gauge the realization of a given intervention’s stated objectives. As projects are increasingly judged by the deliberate, beneficial changes they trigger (= impact), the concept of “results-based management” seeks to establish direct, causal relationships between activities undertaken by a project and the services as well as deliverables thus achieved and changes ensuing on the partners’ and/or recipients’ side. The five OECD-DAC Criteria (relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability) provide objectively verifiable benchmarks to this end. Managing for results first requires that project objectives be conceived in reference to systematic problem analyses, and that, secondly, sets of objectively verifiable indicators be devised to measure the degree to which said objectives are achieved. Once in place, objectives require further operationalization, e.g., by means of being broken down into individually achievable outcomes which, in turn, then provide the point of departure for constructing a process structure consisting of subordinate result chains for each of the outcomes identified. Actual project implementation is primarily governed by jointly conceived plans of operation, to be broken down further into annual work plans. Realizing that the achievement of a project’s objective can normally be verified only towards the end of the implementation period, intermediate benchmarks (“milestones”) must be defined so as to facilitate continuous progress monitoring. Monitoring likewise enables periodical reassessments of the project’s intervention logic in reference to emerging trends and changing framework conditions. This adds a measure of flexibility to the concept of results-based management, encouraging evidence-based adjustment and corrective action as and when required.