Using Stocking Guides to Take Stock of Forest Institutions

Abstract

Policy analysts have struggled to find methods that allow meaningful evaluation of forest management institutions, such as forest-sector decentralization, in terms of the resulting forest conditions. This article demonstrates how to use stocking indices to measure forest conditions when comparing forests across time or space. These measures are especially useful for comparative institutional and policy analysis because they are constructed with a common scale, thus providing a meaningful metric by which to compare conditions. As an example of the application of the method, evidence from Uganda is presented to show a reduction in stocking in many types of Ugandan forests during a time period of forest sector decentralization.