community forestry Archives - Page 196 of 205

Tenure reform and perceived food security in Indonesia: An exploratory study

Key messages

Land and forest tenure reform has been expanding globally, increasingly with the aim of improving the livelihoods and food security of indigenous people and local communities through securing forest access.
In Indonesia, legal rights for local communities to access and manage state forests were partially recognised in 1999. Social forestry only started to advance in 2014, however, following the government’s pledge to transfer the management of 12.7 million ha of forest to forest-dependent communities. Evaluating the impact of these forest tenure reforms on local communities’ food security is critical to understanding the effectiveness of the reforms.
CIFOR has developed a framework to assess the impact of forest tenure reform in Indonesia by comparing the perception of current levels of food security and the perception of changes in food security of communities living in areas that have undergone forest tenure reform with those living in non-reformed forest areas.
Communities’ perceptions of food security are influenced more by household characteristics and level of village development than by forest tenure reform status – the higher the village development, the greater the perception of food security. However, communities that have undergone forest tenure reform are more likely to perceive that their food security status has improved than those who have not.
Communities in customary areas perceived higher food security, however those who had poor access to forests previously, such as those in reform areas, benefitted from forest access through reforms and thus perceived an improvement in food security conditions.

Getting it right, a training course for organizers and implementers of multi-stakeholder forums

This Training Course is tailored to support multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) that focus on a range of environmental and development issues including forest management, protected area management, forest landscape restoration, sustainable agriculture, climate change, carbon mitigation and financing mechanisms. It is designed to provide facilitators with the materials needed to run a four-hour training course on how to address inclusion in MSFs. This training course goes hand-in-hand with the recent Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) publication Getting it right: A guide to improve inclusion in multi-stakeholder forums.

The training provides foundational knowledge, concepts and tools around barriers, and tools to address inclusion as well as lessons learned from around the world that can help organizations involved in organizing and implementing MSFs to improve the inclusion of under-represented people including women, Indigenous Peoples, local community members and others. This facilitated course includes a handbook, a support PowerPoint and four handouts, and several group activities that organizers of MSFs can use to develop strategies and monitor progress towards their inclusion goals.

Safeguards at a glance: Supporting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in REDD+ and other forest-based initiatives

Key messages

Pledges for new investment in tropical forests may support sustainable development objectives, but also pose risks to forest-dependent communities.
This flyer summarises voluntary safeguard standards relevant to REDD+, as well as the guidelines of regional and international multilateral funding institutions.
We compared nine criteria to understand differences across standards and guidelines, focusing on their engagement with the rights of the IPLCs that steward the forests where REDD+ is implemented.
There is considerable variation in how safeguard standards and guidelines engage with the rights of IPLCs.
Voluntary standards can support a transition from ‘doing no harm’ to ‘doing better’ by catalysing a rights-based transformation to re-engage with the women and men of IPLCs as rights-holders and partners rather than beneficiaries.

Forests regenerate on titled Indigenous territories: A multiscale interdisciplinary analysis of 25 Indigenous communities over 40 years in the Peruvian Amazon

Key messages

Tropical forests are highly regenerative, and people who live there often support natural regeneration and reforestation, so it is critical to report on these and not only on forest loss (deforestation).
Titling Indigenous community territories (ICTs) can prevent outsiders from taking over degraded forest areas for other uses, thereby supporting more forest regeneration.
Formalizing tenure for Indigenous territories can be an important component in advancing regional, national and global agendas for reforestation, climate change and justice.
Communities vary considerably in their visions of conservation and development, including how they relate to nature as well as how and why they may deforest and reforest. Those who direct the flow of environmental conservation funds must consider these variations, rather than assuming that all Indigenous communities are inherently devoted to environmental stewardship.
Multidisciplinary science that includes Indigenous experience and knowledge reduces the likelihood that ‘one size fits all’ environmental solutions based only on Remote Earth Observation data will be employed.

Lessons towards rights-responsive REDD+ safeguards from a literature review

Safeguards for REDD+ arose in response to serious concerns voiced by forest-dependent Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and non-governmental organizations, over its potential to infringe upon their rights and territories. Several institutions have also developed voluntary standards for REDD+, in addition to safeguards guidelines adopted by multilateral funding institutions. This working paper examines safeguards experiences in REDD+ and other natural resource management initiatives to understand when safeguards work, for whom, and why. It seeks to extract lessons for rights-responsive safeguards standards and guidelines to protect and support the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and the women within those groups. This work, carried out under CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+, is part of a series on REDD+ safeguards, focusing on the rights and social inclusion concerns of the women and men of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities that steward the forests where climate solutions are implemented.

Intercropping short rotation timber species with teak: Enabling smallholder silviculture practices

Community forest management for timber production requires short-and long-rotation companion species to fulfill the demands of the timber industry, improve farmer welfare and maintain environmental sustainability. Four species (Falcataria moluccana, Neolamarckia cadamba, Acacia mangium and Gmelina arborea) were tested as short-rotation timber crop companion species for teak (Tectona grandis) on dry-rocky soil in the Gunungkidul community forest. The selection of short-rotation timber species was based on growth performance and survival rate at the teak site. Two years after planting, the viability of G. arborea (87.3%) and A. mangium (78.2%) was significantly (p < 0.05) higher than that of N. cadamba (40.6%) and F. moluccana (18.0%). G. arborea and N. cadamba achieved the best growth in terms of height, diameter, basal area, and volume, with the growth of A. mangium and F. moluccana being significantly inferior. Gmelina arborea has the ability to adapt to teak sites, grow well, and accompany teak. Neolamarckia cadamba demonstrated good growth with potential as a teak companion, and it demonstrated limited drought tolerance on the dry-rocky soils of the study sites. Acacia mangium had a high survival but produced slow growth, indicating that it required an advance evaluation in future years. Falcataria moluccana has different growing site requirements to teak so the performance was relatively poor at the study site. This mixed pattern provides benefits to farmers through commercial thinning of short rotations species, 5–8 years post establishment. Thinning operations will also increase the productivity of residual teak stands. The diversification of timber species in community forests can provide earlier returns, enabling the adoption of silviculture management by smallholders and communities. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Tools to improve inclusion in multistakeholder forums (MSFs)

Key messages

Organizers and designers of multistakeholder forums (MSFs) are increasingly seeing the inclusion of women and Indigenous Peoples as both a responsibility and duty. However, in a global survey, practitioners also informed us that they needed tools to help them apply a rights-based framework to their work and improve inclusion in practice.
Responding to this need, we used our findings to develop a theory of change and two tools to help practitioners focus their inclusion efforts, providing step-by-step instructions on how to apply these tools in an MSF setting, as well as examples.
Getting it right is the result – a practical guide that draws on lessons learned from the literature and practitioners around the world, to help organizers and designers of MSFs unpack and operationalize the inclusion of women and Indigenous Peoples.
This infobrief provides an overview of the process behind creating the guide, its key features, and recommendations for next steps.
Possible areas of future research include lessons learned and best practices from the application and testing of the guide, as well as understanding the success factors and constraints specific to other under-represented groups.

Sustainability planning with community and local stakeholders

Sustainability planning with the community and local stakeholders is important to ensure that promoted land restoration practices continue being implemented after the Regreening Africa Programme transitions at the end of 2022. Sustainability planning should be part of the programme’s exit planning.

Circles and spirals

This chapter begins with a look at the Greek concepts of ouroboros and triskelion, emphasizing the static versus dynamic nature of social phenomena, linking ACM to the latter. The authors systematically re-examine the chapters in this book, seeking clarity on what ACM is. They then examine how successful it has been in its various manifestations, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses. The next section looks in depth at two major African programmes to take the insights from ACM, usually conducted at a local level, to a broader scale or higher level, encompassing larger geographical areas (SHARED and Greening Africa). This section is valuable in its demonstration of some of the differences that emerge, but also the applicability, when one attempts ACM at grander scales. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on changing global paradigms and the philosophical implications of ACM for people’s lives.

Learning from adaptive collaborative management: A participatory tool to support adaptive and reflective learning in multi-stakeholder forums

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are, by definition, organized attempts at collaboration. Given the current interest and investment in MSFs in development and conservation circles, CIFOR worked with subnational MSFs organized for more sustainable land and resource use in Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Peru. Research revealed that although much optimism is placed on MSFs, their organizers believed their forums fostered equity simply by inviting more actors to the table and thus placed little effort on addressing the power inequalities between their participants. Recognizing this challenge, and taking lessons from adaptive collaborative management, CIFOR researchers embarked on a collaboration with MSF participants to develop an adaptive and reflexive learning tool to allow forum participants to monitor and reflect on their work. The purpose of this reflection is to learn from the past, consider progress and obstacles to further progress, and collectively plan how to achieve the MSF’s goals in the future. The chapter presents a synthesis of the research findings that led to tool development, the tool’s development process, and the effort to use ACM more effectively in participatory monitoring.

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