This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.
Agenda 21 recommends: (a) launching graduate and post-graduate degree, specialization and research programmes in forestry and forest management, and (b) establishing and/or strengthening institutions for forest education and training, as well as forestry industries, so as to develop an adequate cadre of trained and skilled staff at the professional, technical and vocational levels, with emphasis on youth and women.
Since 1983 the International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada and the Ministry of Forestry of the Peoples' Republic of China have jointly organised and sponsored an International Farm Forestry Training Programme. It is hoped that through this training programme it will give benefit to other countries which face similar problems of competing priorities between agricultural and wood production.
Forestry science is firmly based on the ideas of rationalization, emancipation, and progress, reflecting its emergence in the late seventeenth century. As an applied science, mainstream forestry has been preoccupied with bio-technical and economic research. The development in forestry sciences during the last four decades has broadened this narrow utilitarian approach. Social and ecological dimensions of forestry are now acknowledged as legitimate and undeniable fields for forestry research. The new concept is not yet operationalized, but encompasses besides economic efficiency also equity and ecological sustainability. Indigenous forestry as an ethnoscience points at the cultural and philosophical biases still underlying professional forestry and forestry science.