In 2006, the Center for International Forestry Research, in coordination with the Rights and Resources Initiative, launched a global research project in over 30 sites in 10 countries aimed at understanding the origins, nature and initial outcomes of forest tenure reform. The countries are in Asia (India, Nepal and the Philippines), Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Ghana) and Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala and Nicaragua). Preliminary research was also conducted in Laos. The project took a rights-based approach and had the simultaneous goals of studying the forest tenure reform and catalysing efforts to advance local control and sustainable forest management The result is a wealth of multi-scalar information and analysis obtained through diverse entities and methods and covering a large variety of reforms in multiple contexts. This CD Rom presents a number of project outputs. It includes 12 country and region reports, 8 policy briefs, 2 Latin America synthesis reports, and several conference papers, journal articles and book chapters. These publications can be accessed by country, and cross-country comparisons are organised by world region. The CD Rom also includes the introductory chapter to Forests for People: Community Rights and Forest Tenure Reform – a book analysing key cross-cutting issues from the research
Tag: community forestry
Seeing people through the trees: mitigating and adapting to climate change without undermining rights and livelihoods
New Rights for forest-based communities?: understanding processes of forest tenure reform
This article reports on findings from a research project, in more than 30 sites in 10 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, aimed at analyzing cases where changes in formal tenure rights for forest-based communities had recently occurred or were in process. Though by far largest proportion of the world’s forests are owned by the state, over a quarter of forests in developing countries are now owned by or assigned to communities. This suggests, at least in some ways, a marked departure from the historic trend towards centralizing. The project, led by the Center for International Forestry Research in coordination with the Rights and Resources Initiative in 2006-2008, sought to identify issues and concerns from the perspective of socially and economically vulnerable groups that were seeking rights reforms. The objectives were to understand reform processes, particularly the extent to which community rights had improved in practice. This article reports on the analysis of three aspects of the reforms: the broad global trends shaping them, challenges in implementation and outcomes for livelihoods and forests.
Reconciling agriculture with the conservation of tropical forests
The expansion of agriculture is widely held to be one of the causes of tropical deforestation. Simply stated, the progressive expansion of agriculture into areas of tropical forest can only occur when forests are slashed. There is little doubt that in many places an increased need for agricultural land goes hand in hand with expansion into forestland. However, the relationship between agricultural expansion and tropical deforestation is more complex than a simple addition and subtraction formula suggests. Many forms of tropical agriculture are integrated with forestry activities. Forests play an important role in the complex of resource management among many farmers in the tropics. Although such tropical agroforestry is no alternative for strict forest conservation in protected areas, it is a viable alternative—especially from a conservation point of view—to other agricultural development schemes that are often proposed or blindly copied in many tropical countries.
Tenure Rights and Beyond: Community Access to Forest Resources in Latin America
This occasional paper is the result of research carried out from 2006 to 2008 on the effects of new tenure rights for forest-based communities in Latin America on access to forest resources and benefits. Focused on seven different regions in four countries, the paper examines changes in statutory rights, the implementation of those rights in practice, and the extent to which they have led to tangible new benefits from forests, particularly to new sources of income. The research sites included several types of conservation and settlement communities in the Brazilian Amazon, an indigenous territory and agro-extractive communities in Bolivia, indigenous territories in Nicaragua and community forest concessions and highland communal forests in Guatemala. Though the granting of tenure rights signifies an important achievement for many communities, new statutory rights do not automatically turn into rights in practice. Virtually all of the cases — even those in which benefits have been significant — encountered substantial challenges along the road from rights to benefits: conflicts with other resource claimants; the failure of the state to define the tenure right appropriately or defend it effectively; problems with local authorities and governance institutions; the superposition of new models over existing institutions; obstacles to community engagement with markets; and the lack of systems to support forest resource management. The bundle of rights granted is sometimes overwhelmed by an accompanying bundle of responsibilities, or limited by restrictions on use, and may include an important ongoing decision-making role for certain state authorities. Institutional arrangements are also shaped by a variety of local authorities, some of which have been created or given substantial new powers in the reform process but lack experience and clear accountability relations. The state often appears more concerned with establishing management regulations than with defending community rights; for their part, communities and their organizations are forced to waste time and resources defending their rights from outside interests, rather than using these to strengthen local governance and forest management capacity. Policy frameworks have generally failed to establish an enabling environment for endogenous, community-based management opportunities. The gains that have been won and the potential of these processes for improving rights and livelihoods demonstrate the value of promoting efforts to overcome these obstacles.
New niches of community rights to forests in Cameroon: tenure reform, decentralization category or something else?
In a difficult political economy, marked notably by a multifaceted crisis, Cameroon, like many other African countries, launched the restructuring of the policy and legal framework that governed the management of forest until the mid-1990s. Given the deep conflict of discourse surrounding the issue of forest ownership and rights to forest in Central Africa, the allocation of new niches of community rights to forest is, in theory, meaningful of the emergence of a new type of relations between the ‘central’ and the ‘local’ and, therefore, a new configuration of issues like resource ‘politics’ and resource governance. Unlike West, East or Southern Africa, resource tenure is a not really an old research domain in Central Africa. While injecting information on the topic, the essay interrogates the nature of ongoing change in the structure of community rights to forest in Cameroon. In policy terms, what is really this change? Some call it tenure change, some others call it decentralization. Using conceptual, theoretical and empirical arguments, the essay conducts a policy analysis of both options and concludes that this is neither a strict decentralization process nor a strict tenure reform. It is a mixture of devolution and delegation of powers. Theorists, policy designers and professional must be informed about this dilemma.
Sustainability performance of community forest enterprises (CFES) in Cameroon: Pathways to viable business models
Community forestry has evolved from devolved forest management to the valorisation of forest resources for community development. Community forest enterprises (CFEs) now apply business approaches to enhance economic, social, and environmental outcomes. However, limited research has evaluated CFE performance in tropical countries across these dimensions. This paper proposes a contextualized multi-dimensional framework to evaluate CFEs’ performance and applies it to nine CFEs in Cameroon. Data were collected from income and expenditure statements, forest land-use transects, satellite image analysis, and focus group discussions. The study evaluates the performance of Community Forest Enterprises (CFEs) in Cameroon using a multi-dimensional framework. The majority (66.67 %) are intermediate performers, with scores between 2.5 and 3. However, they score poorly on the economic dimension, making them intermediate but skewed performers with better scores on social and environmental dimensions. Only 11.11 % CFE is classified as an effective performer, with scores of three or above on all dimensions. The study found that CFEs face significant challenges in effectively allocating resources to trade in forest products and generating profits, resulting in poor economic performance. However, they perform better in investing in social projects, employing community members, and reducing illegal logging and agricultural expansion. Financial and technical support, policy coordination, and institutional collaboration are needed to improve performance.
Revisiting Community-Based Forest Governance: Case Study from Nepal on Community Attributes, Social Capital and Consensus Decision-Making
Community forest management (CFM) originated in 1970s as an alternative arrangement of forest governance, which has now become a flagship institution for sustainable management of forests in developing countries. The premise of CFM asserts that the control over forest use and management is devolved to the forest users at the community level. With the increasing knowledge about role of forests in climate change, CFM has been identified as a core strategy for implementing climate change mitigation policies such as reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+). This thesis is motivated by research questions that are crucial for advancing our understanding of the gaps and weaknesses of CFM in its current form. Hence, in this thesis, I set out to revisit its key elements, i.e. decision-making, user participation and the collective capacity (in the form of social capital) of forest users to engage in collective management of forests. Nepal provides an excellent study site because of its extensive history of community forest user group (CFUG) establishment since forty years. CFUG is a local-level institution for forest management where the local people make decisions regarding forest management, utilization, and the distribution of benefits from the forests.
Fostering resilient institutional arrangements: Case study on partnership between Yogyakarta Forest Management Unit and Notowono Cooperative
Forest and communities – Social forestry in Sabah
This chapter examines the role of social forestry in Sabah, Malaysia, as a key approach to linking forest conservation with community development. It highlights how social forestry initiatives—such as agroforestry, forest restoration, and joint forest management—help address challenges including land encroachment, shifting cultivation, and rural poverty. The chapter emphasizes the importance of community participation, Indigenous knowledge, and mechanisms such as free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) in achieving sustainable forest management. While social forestry has improved livelihoods and forest protection, persistent challenges remain related to funding, land rights, and equitable benefit sharing, underscoring the need for integrated, inclusive, and long-term governance approaches.