The changing relationship between science, policy and society in a context of increasing internationalisation and public challenges to formal expertise, is a subject for hot debate. At another level, there are live issues around rural landscape and livelihoods in low-income countries.

This Bulletin connects the two by focusing on tropical forests, particularly in West Africa and the Caribbean, so strongly implicated as they are both in local livelihoods and struggles for resource control, and in scientific and policy debates locally, and in the global arena.

The articles review important advances in the science of forest dynamics, which in turn, suggest ways that forest policies could become more ‘pro-poor’. The Bulletin was developed from a series of workshop presentations at IDS in March 2001.