In the rapidly growing Tanzanian economy, increasing demand for timber and limited wood supply from industrial plantations and natural forests have opened a new livelihood opportunity for smallholder farmers in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, which is undergoing a tree-growing boom. In the absence of support services, research and statistics, the magnitude of the phenomena has remained unclear, along with the farmers’ capability to meet market demands, access the markets, and negotiate prices. Primary qualitative data were collected to clarify the role of smallholder tree growers in the forest transition process and wood value chain using 60 semi-structured tree farmer interviews in four villages, and through interviews of timber buyers and processors. The findings indicate that the strong market demand has created dual markets, where higher quality industrial plantations mainly supply larger industries, whereas micro and small enterprises source wood from lower quality smallholder plantations. While the markets’ quality criteria are expected to tighten, capacity building is needed to improve smallholder wood quality to ensure the long-run tree-growing livelihood and competitiveness of small-scale producers in the markets.

This paper builds on the idea of cross-border regional innovation system (CBRIS) to investigate the implications of global and regional changes in social, political, economic, and ecological systems on cross-border regions. In an era of increasingly abrupt changes in border permeability, CBRIS offers an intriguing context for studying such processes. Our main contribution is to define a resilient CBRIS (R-CBRIS) for sustainability based on careful reading of previous literature on resilience, sustainability, and CBRIS integration. As merging these concepts requires a sound understanding of the factors driving or constraining CBRIS integration, we conduct a systematic review of the literature to answer our main research question: what factors affect the resilience and sustainability of CBRIS? The literature reveals that the studied CBRIS are not particularly sustainable and that their resilience remains a neglected topic. This is a definite cause for concern for everyone interested in the long-term success of cross-border regions.