It was formed in Geneva, Switzerland in June 1994 as a result of the Rio Forest Principles developed at the 1992 Earth Summit.
In February 1995, countries in the Montréal Process adopted the Santiago Declaration which confirmed their commitment to the conservation and sustainable management of forests.
Chandran and Innes, researchers at the Department of Forest Resources Management, University of British Columbia, stated “current reporting practices, if not corrected, will create difficulties in communicating progress in sustainable forest management amongst countries” (Chandran, 2014, p. 103).
It is extremely difficult to assess progress towards the goal, therefore, criteria and indicators are used to make the mission understandable by simplifying the essential components of sustainable forest management by providing a common understanding, as well as a universal framework for describing each individual country's progress towards sustainability at a national level (The Montreal Process, 2015, para.
The Montréal Process Working Group settled on these criteria and indicators after consulting with various professionals such as forest managers and users, researchers, private industry, technical and policy experts from non-member countries, and the international scientific community (The Montréal Process, 2015, p. 8).
The Montréal Process's criteria and indicators is “a prima facie example of sectoral capture of a normative process” that were agreed to remarkably quick for an intergovernmental agreement, unlike what occurred at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development where efforts in creating a legally-binding forest management agreement was met with constant rejection and failure (Gale, 2014, p. 174).