Criteria and indicators of forest management for excellence

In Cuban forest sector enterprises, the application of control tools is linked to the process management approach and, in this field, sustainable forest management criteria and indicators are one of the instruments used, although their use is not systemically linked to the strategic management and management control of the sector's enterprises, which reduces the effectiveness of the decision-making process and limits the scope of management. The objective of this contribution focused on proposing a set of criteria and indicators of forest management to evaluate the level of performance of enterprises in the sector on the road to excellence. An exploratory and descriptive research was carried out using a procedure based on a qualitative methodology, which made it possible to identify the main processes of criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management applied at national and international level, codify and categorize them, and formulate a set of four criteria and twenty-seven indicators of forest management for excellence and a map of cause-effect relationships among them. The proposed criteria and indicators of forest management for excellence summarize the elements to be addressed for sustainable forest management and, where appropriate, integrate issues inherent to the enterprise activity in a coordinated and balanced manner with its subsystems.