FLEGT VPAs: Laying a pathway to sustainability via legality lessons from Ghana and Indonesia

The long-term objective of the 2003 EU FLEGT Action Plan was to ensure a legal trade of timber products within and between countries and, by doing so, clear a pathway towards global sustainability and good governance. Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and producing countries have emerged as a primary tool for achieving these goals. VPAs combine legality licensing as a market-based approach to stem illegal harvesting and trade with multi-stakeholder processes that seek to address underlying problems of forest governance, including unclear or contradictory forest related laws and weak community rights.