Analyzing the perception of deforestation drivers by African policy makers in light of possible REDD+ policy responses

• REDD + (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation)
• Analysis of drivers of deforestation through content analysis
• 18 African national REDD-Readiness documents
• Countries emphasize institutional and policy drivers of deforestation.
• Implications for result-based payments phase are discussed.

As REDD+ countries are moving towards the implementation phase of their national REDD+ programs, it becomes crucial to better understand what drives deforestation in order to identify policy responses. This however, remains challenging because, while the number of scientific assessments of deforestation drivers is increasing, they often reach diverging conclusions. Deforestation drivers can have long underlying causal chains and take different shapes depending on the perspective that is chosen. As states are the official owners of forests in most African countries, analyzing the perspective of policy makers on deforestation in this context, helps revealing deforestation drivers that are harder to quantify, define and measure with usual proxies. It also potentially allows identifying politically and institutionally feasible deforestation reduction measures.In this paper content analysis is used to assess how African policy makers perceive deforestation drivers. We find that they strongly emphasize the role of institutional and policy drivers. Furthermore, we find that some of the complex issues related to forest governance in general, can be narrowed down to very specific problems. In light of these findings, we will argue that mechanisms and standards have to be found to allow institutional and policy drivers of deforestation to be addressed in the result-based payments phase of REDD+.