community forestry Archives - Page 198 of 205

Adaptive Collaborative Management in Forest Landscapes: Villagers, Bureaucrats and Civil Society

This book examines the value of Adaptive Collaborative Management for facilitating learning and collaboration with local communities and beyond, utilising detailed studies of forest landscapes and communities. Many forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies, such as the Million Tree Initiatives, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and REDD+, often neglecting local communities. In the context of the climate crisis, it is imperative that local peoples and communities are an integral part of all decisions relating to resource management. Rather than being seen as beneficiaries or people to be safeguarded, they should be seen as full partners, and Adaptive Collaborative Management is an approach which priorities the rights and roles of communities alongside the need to address the environmental crisis. The volume presents detailed case studies and real life examples from across the globe, promoting and prioritizing the voices of women and scholars and practitioners from the Global South who are often under-represented. Providing concrete examples of ways that a bottom-up approach can function to enhance development sustainably, via its practitioners and far beyond the locale in which they initially worked, this volume demonstrates the lasting utility of approaches like Adaptive Collaborative Management that emphasize local control, inclusiveness and local creativity in management. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development and natural resource management and development studies more broadly.

“See also Book Talk by Carol Colfer at Cornell University Library”.

Gender and adaptive collaborative management in forested Ugandan landscapes

Forestry management in Uganda has traditionally been a masculine field, although recent years have seen a number of changes in such management. With the introduction of participatory approaches such as adaptive collaborative management (ACM) and collaborative forest management (CFM), today, women more commonly own forest and work in the forestry sector. Despite this, the degree of women’s involvement remains low in comparison to their male counterparts. In order to address this gender gap, this chapter examines three questions: (1) what determines men’s and women’s participation in forest management under different forest management approaches? (2) How do men and women rate their quality of participation in forest management in public or private forestry spaces? (3) What do women and men harvest from the forest and how do they use the income earned from the sale of forest products? To answer these questions data were collected from a nationwide intra-household survey from 1052 respondents across four agro-ecological zones, under multiple forest tenure regimes. The analyses show that the gender gap in participation and representation in community forestry in Uganda was minimized in communities where ACM was being implemented. The study recommends that forest adjacent communities should 1) enter into participatory forest management arrangements with the forest owners/managers (national forest authority, local government or private forest owners) or 2) be facilitated to form tree-planting groups or associations by NGOs and local government forestry officials, as a means to increase women’s participation in forestry.

Is the Formalization of Collective Tenure Rights Supporting Sustainable Indigenous Livelihoods? Insights from Comunidades Nativas in the Peruvian Amazon

After decades of activism by Indigenous Peoples and their allies, the need to formalize Indigenous land rights has received increasing global attention as a strategy to address climate change. Research has highlighted the compatibility between community forest management regimes and carbon sequestration, reiterating the essential role that securing Indigenous land tenure must play in forest-based climate change mitigation strategies. Based on research conducted in six Indigenous Comunidades Nativas with formal collective titles in Peruvian Amazonia, this article argues that titling alone is not enough to ensure that Indigenous Peoples are supported and enabled to access their recognized rights and play a central role in addressing the climate crisis. Indigenous Awajún and Asháninka informants discussed challenges with accessing suitable livelihoods, excessive restrictions on timber harvest, land conflicts with smallholder migrant farmers and extractive concessions, unclear conflict resolution mechanisms, and policies that assume a communal governance model that differs from actual Indigenous leadership roles and institutions. All of these challenges put pressure on community members, creating incentives for unsustainable land and resource use, and undermining their abilities to protect their forests. Although Peru has included Comunidades Nativas and other co-managed areas in the mitigation actions toward its Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement, it must re-examine its titling reforms, and the way that Comunidades’ land and resource access is regulated and weakened. This will allow for titling in practice to live up to its promise in theory as a strategy for promoting equity and mitigating climate change.

A framework for analysing contextual factors shaping forest-poverty dynamics

Forest and tree-based landscapes represent complex social-ecological systems. In tropical and subtropical regions, these landscapes are home to hundreds of millions of resource-poor people. Gaining a better understanding of how contextual factors influence forest-poverty dynamics is essential for the design, targeting and implementation of effective policy instruments and interventions to alleviate poverty. In this article we present an innovative framework for exploring the social, economic, political, institutional and environmental factors affecting forestry-poverty dynamics. We use two examples of widely used forest management and conservation interventions, namely protected areas and community forestry, to illustrate how these factors can take multiple roles in complex causal chains of processes of social and environmental change in forest and tree-based landscapes. We highlight how future research can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the processes and contexts shaping forest-poverty dynamics, including elucidating the differentiated effects of different drivers of change on multiple social and environmental outcomes over time. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Lessons on social inclusion for transformative forest-based bioeconomy solutions

Key messages

The transformational potential of bioeconomy solutions to advance environmental sustainability rests on whether they can deploy strategies for social sustainability.
Bioeconomy can learn important lessons on social inclusion from previous research on redistribution, recognition, and representation concerns in forest-based climate initiatives.
Initiatives should recognize Indigenous Peoples and local communities as right-holders in their design and implementation.
They should ensure that enabling conditions are in place for women, youth and Indigenous Peoples and local communities to participate effectively throughout an initiative’s lifetime.
Initiatives should also provide mechanisms to promote a just and fair distribution of costs and benefits between stakeholders.

DRYAD Project: Applying performance based financing to scale sustainable community forestry in Cameroon

This brief outlines the key elements of the project approach and targeted recommendations for upscaling to other geographic and natural resource management contexts, based on five years of implementation experience in Cameroon.

Coalitions for Landscape Resilience: Institutional Dynamics behind Community-Based Rangeland Management System in North-Western Tanzania

The past few decades have seen a continuing shift of natural resource management paradigm towards multifunctional and multi-actor adaptive management in hope of achieving more resilient landscapes. Recognizing the multitude of institutional actors and their roles as well as dynamics helps to understand communal behaviour, its manifestations in the landscape and resilience under changing socioecological circumstances. We examined institutional actors and their functions and relationships in a long-standing community-based natural resource management system, the ngitili, in north-western part of Tanzania. The aim of the research was to deepen understanding on the role of institutional arrangements and their limitations in supporting resilience of community-based management system. Data was collected through group discussions and interviews in three case study villages and district level, and institutional arrangements were analysed using 4Rs framework and social network analysis. The study shows that the management arrangements have evolved with time and are based on locally negotiated roles and collaboration among bureaucratic and socially embedded village level actors. These local level actors are resource poor, which hinders collaboration and implementation of ngitili management functions. External interventions have temporarily increased management efficiency in the villages but they did not create sustained multi-scale collaboration networks to address external threats to the ngitili resources. The results show that diversified funding sources, technical support and benefit sharing mechanisms are required to incentivize sustainable resource management. For the management system to be more resilient, the existing institutional actors and their ability to adapt should be nurtured by awareness raising, wider stakeholder participation and bridging organizations.

Learning from Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) in Ghana and Zambia: Lessons for integrated landscape approaches

Land use in much of sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by legislative frameworks based on a strong colonial legacy, focusing strongly on state control and minimal devolution of management responsibilities to local communities. However, attempts to reconcile conservation and socio-economic development by increasing stakeholder engagement in community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) have been undertaken since the late 1980s. Based on a review of published literature on historical land-use trajectories, the evolution of CBNRM, and key respondent interviews with NRM experts in Ghana and Zambia, this paper asks: What lessons can be learned from CBNRM to inform integrated landscape approaches for more equitable social and ecological outcomes? The paper discusses the positive characteristics and persistent challenges arising from CBNRM initiatives in both countries. The former being, improved rights and resource access, an established institutional structure at the local level, and a conservation approach tailored to the local context. The latter include the absence of multi-scale collaboration, inadequate inclusive and equitable local participation, and limited sustainability of CBNRM initiatives beyond short-term project funding timelines. The paper argues that integrated landscape approaches can address these challenges and improve natural resource management in Ghana and Zambia. We urge landscape practitioners to consider how the lessons learned from CBNRM are being addressed in practice, as they represent both challenges and opportunities for landscape approaches to improve natural resource management.

Community perception of ecosystem services from commercially managed forests in Bhutan

Given the direct dependence rural communities have on forests, understanding ecosystem services can empower communities and align stakeholders to define priorities and objectives for the sustainable management of forest resources. In this qualitative study on the forest ecosystem services in Bhutan, we assessed community awareness and perceptions of local forest ecosystem services, identified their top priorities, and evaluated how they have changed over time. The study focused on state reserve forest areas designated for commercial timber production, formally known as forest management units (FMU). We held focus group discussions separately with women and men associated with five FMUs in the central belt of the country. Participants identified 45 ecosystem services, with soil productivity, freshwater, timber, fresh air, construction stone, carbon sequestration, spiritual value, pollination, and local weather regulation comprising the most highly valued services critical to local livelihood and well-being. Participants felt that forest ecosystem services have been generally declining over the past decade in the FMUs and identified a need for forest restoration activities to improve their delivery. We recommend that state forest entities conduct an awareness campaign to empower communities with the conceptual framework and globally recognized concepts to advocate for their needs related to forests. We also recommend that biophysical and economic studies be conducted in these areas to seek evidence for causal linkages between natural resource use and the status of ecosystem services. This study contributes to a growing literature on ecosystem services in Bhutan and provides a basis for future studies to understand how management activities can impact the delivery of critical services.

Local communities’ and indigenous peoples’ land and forestry rights: Assessing the law and practice on tenure security in Kenya

This study aimed to understand whether, and to what extent, Kenyan legal provisions are sufficient to secure community land rights, particularly those of indigenous peoples and local communities. It assesses the adequacy of Kenya’s legal framework for protecting and promoting tenure rights of forest communities, including over protected areas. There is an enduring problem pertaining to historical land injustices, where certain indigenous peoples and local communities have sought formal recognition of their land rights over areas classified as public land, which are managed mainly as public forests or national wildlife reserves.

The analysis uses three indicators to evaluate the levels of protection and securing of community land and forest tenure rights: the scope and security of tenure; the legal status and protection of indigenous peoples’ (forest peoples’) tenure rights; and community participation in management of public forests.

It demonstrates that there are improvements in legal protection for indigenous communities. Nonetheless, a legal conundrum results from how Kenyan courts have interpreted the law concerning claims by certain indigenous communities over land falling under article 63(2)(d)(i) of the Constitution, mainly classified as public land or forests. For example, whereas the African court recognized the Ogiek rights over Mau Forest, the Kenyan courts have declined to do so. Also, despite its finding, the African Court did not prescribe how those land rights can be actualized; and the courts in Kenya have advised the communities to utilize the resolution of historical land injustices procedures prescribed in law. This Occasional Paper explores this case and others.

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