Forest tenure reform has opened economic and livelihood opportunities for community forestry management through the devolution of management rights under broader decentralisation reforms. However, the transfer of rights and associated power to forest communities is usually partial. The view of property as composed of ‘bundles of rights’ allows for the disaggregation of rights transferred from government to local people. In practice, it is common that rights held by natural resource stakeholders encompass only part of the rights bundle. This partial transfer of rights shapes community forestry institutions and the manner in which they function. When communities and state agencies share responsibilities and benefits of forest management, they collaborate within co-management systems. Co-management systems are attractive to governments because they open avenues for local participation in resource governance and more equitable benefit-sharing while maintaining some level of state control. However, co-management systems can place a greater burden on community level actors without providing the corresponding benefits. As a result, co-management can fail to meet expectations. In response, the promotion of community forestry may require greater emphasis on adjusting forest regulatory frameworks, institutions, and agencies, to allow more freedom by community-level actors in developing forest management systems
Tag: community forestry
Rights and wellbeing: an analytical approach to global case comparison of community forestry
Many countries have adopted policies supported community forestry. Trends towards community empowerment, livelihood improvement and decentralized decision-making are being done by providing more rights to forest dependent people. However, empirical data to support clear understanding on the correlation between resource rights and wellbeing or poverty are missing. The paper provides an analytical approach to figuring out forest resource rights and their connections to wellbeing. Twenty seven cases of community forestry in Asia, Africa and Latin America were selected, clustered and analyzed using non-linear principle component analysis. We found there was correlation between rights of forest resources and wellbeing although was not very strong. There was also connection between income and equity as well as between equity and sustainability of forest. This implies that giving more rights to local people is not enough for improving wellbeing without facilitating for better institution and governance.
From disclosure to policy: the practical interface of statutory and customary land and forest rights
The devolution of management rights and the co-management of community forests
Who represents the collective?: Authority and the recognition of forest rights
Participatory action research on adaptive collaborative management of community forests: a multi-country model
This case study summary highlights CIFOR and partners’ participatory action research based project entitled ‘Adaptive and Collaborative Management of Community Forests’. The project, which included activities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, explored the potential contribution of collaboration and social learning based forest management to enhancing human and forest ecosystem well-being. The project combined participatory action research with more traditional social and biophysical research to create a valuable multi-country comparison that also had positive local impacts.
Community networks, collective action and forest management benefits
Assessing the role of learning devices and geovisualisation tools for collective action in natural resource management: Experiences from Vietnam
In northern Vietnam uplands the successive policy reforms that accompanied agricultural decollectivisation triggered very rapid changes in land use in the 1990s. From a centralized system of natural resource management, a multitude of individual strategies emerged which contributed to new production interactions among farming households, changes in landscape structures, and conflicting strategies among local stakeholders. Within this context of agrarian transition, learning devices can help local communities to collectively design their own course of action towards sustainable natural resource management. This paper presents a collaborative approach combining a number of participatory methods and geovisualisation tools (e.g., spatially explicit multi-agent models and role-playing games) with the shared goal to analyse and represent the interactions between: (i) decision-making processes by individual farmers based on the resource profiles of their farms; (ii) the institutions which regulate resource access and usage; and (iii) the biophysical and socioeconomic environment. This methodological pathway is illustrated by a case study in Bac Kan Province where it successfully led to a communication platform on natural resource management. In a context of rapid socioeconomic changes, learning devices and geovisualisation tools helped embed the participatory approach within a process of community development. The combination of different tools, each with its own advantages and constraints, proved highly relevant for supporting collective natural resource management.
Action research with local forest users and managers: global lessons from CIFOR’s research on Adaptive Collaborative Management
Carrying out action research with forest dependent communities calls for special attention to their tenure arrangement, power relations, heterogeneity and the governance arrangements of the forests they use or manage. This is what over four years of CIFOR s research on adaptive collaborative management (ACM) of forests in eleven countries reveals. Using examples from three of those countries we show how important it is to address passiveness, power relations and social and institutional capitals during a process of action research, and participatory action research, aimed at improving livelihoods, equity and forest systems. The ACM research also shows that processes of change tend to be slow, and four years is barely enough to bring about observable changes. The most sensitive livelihood capitals to the action research, possibly because they were primary foci of the research, were human and social capitals. The ACM research shows the importance of shared or social learning as a driver of change in the action research. We conclude that using action research with forest dependent people, groups and organizations is a viable approach to generating both change and understanding about the people and the forest systems.