Our Roles: Convening, Disseminating Information and Facilitating Deals

We have played three roles of strategic convener, strategic analysts, and market catalysts in our efforts to bring about sustainable forest management and forest conservation. We have learned that these three roles are powerful tools, are interrelated, and that there are real risks and tradeoffs between them. For example, active deal making can affect the credibility of our information and limit our effectiveness. We re-examined the issues and options within each of these roles.

Convening

Convening diverse stakeholders around important forest issues and new green market opportunities is the role we've played most prominently. From this experience we have developed the following criteria for action:

• Our goal in convening is to connect strategic partners, facilitate deals, validate market innovation that is consistent with our mission, and generate collective learning on new markets.
• Our target audience is market players or market makers, primarily including the leading agents in industry and finance, but also those in government and non-governmental organizations influential in markets.
• We will only convene on invitation from a local partner, and when an invitation is not volunteered in a strategic arena, we will cultivate relationships and actively create an opportunity to convene.
• In convening as in every other role, we will strive to contribute to the local setting, strengthen local change agents and also capture lessons from local experiences for the global, public good.
  

Strategic Analysis

Our success in achieving our mission and strategic goals has been and will continue to be predicated on our ability to deliver critical and credible information produced in well-designed style to a strategically targeted audience at the decisive time. Our action in this domain will be guided by the following criteria:

• Our goal is to be objective analyzers and synthesizers of market and policy trends relevant to the pursuit of our mission, and also balanced promoters of new opportunities for improving forest conservation.
• Our strategy will entail a regular set of publications, including: the Ecosystem Marketplace™ , the Community Marketplace, Trendlines, technical briefing papers on key market and policy issues; reports that go into greater depth on these issues, and media outlets (see communication).
• Our publications will be directed to key market players involved in forestry, with each publication focusing on a particular set of those market players, and will be translated into appropriate languages (Spanish, Chinese).
• Our set of websites will enable the global community to access information about us as well as other information relevant to our mission and programs.
  

Catalyzing Market Transactions

Over the next five years we will aggressively expand this capacity, building on our growing network of contacts and experience in the key forest markets. We plan to:

• bring on a finance/business director and build additional staff capacity to fulfill this role;
• launch the Ecosystem Marketplace™ , a global information service on environmental markets, and bring it to self-sustainability in three years (2008);
• build the Business Development Facility into a robust portfolio of projects that demonstrate a new forest business model;
• leverage other key institutions to invest in sustainable forest activity and conservation, particularly when local communities/low income producers benefit.

Overall Criteria For Action

The basic criteria that we identified in our first strategic plan as to how we will intervene are still useful.

We will focus our work where the proposed activity has a high impact on a critical area of natural forest (“critical” being defined both in terms of global ecological significance and level of threat), where the activity would have a structural impact on the forest market, and where the activity would benefit local communities. We will also only intervene when we can add value and we have the capacity to deliver a high quality product, and can do so in a way that strengthens local change agents and our partnerships with them.

How we intervene will depend on the level of market development. Where the market is emerging, such as for forest services, we will focus on building and strengthening the enabling environment for thriving markets. This would include identifying market opportunities and constraints and generating and disseminating information to key market players, as well as identifying best practice and promising initiatives and opportunities for expansion. Where markets are more advanced, such as the case of certified wood, we will focus on increasing the transactions in the market. This would include for example, strengthening the demand for certified wood, encouraging discerning investment in sustainable forestry operations, and linking supply with demand and communities with new markets.