Logjam

Winner of the International Studies Association's Harold and Margaret Sprout Award 2008 for the best book on international environmental problems. In this timely book, David Humphreys, author of Forest Politics, extends his analysis of the main political developments in forest governance over the last decade including recent 2005 and 2006 negotiations at the UN. Humphreys shows how the unwillingness of many governments and businesses to grapple with the causes of deforestation has rendered the UN largely ineffective in protecting the public goods value of forests. As a result the crisis of deforestation has deepened. He tracks all the main intergovernmental forest processes and follows the creation of novel mechanisms to address forest certification and illegal logging, but argues that they alone cannot solve the problem. He concludes by suggesting some policy innovations to address one of the most pressing environmental problems of our age.

David Humphreys is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Policy at the Open University UK