Community forestry has long been regarded as a way to achieve the sustainable management of forest and tree resources while maximizing benefits for those responsible for the custodianship of natural resources. Throughout much of the developing world, forests and the lands they occupy have been increasingly ceded to the management and control of Indigenous peoples and local communities. In the post-conflict environment of Liberia, community forestry has been identified as a means of maximizing the engagement of local communities in forest management initiatives. Liberia’s recent comprehensive National Forestry Policy is an important step forward in this process. The new legislative framework makes it clear that a major reorientation of the forestry sector is required if it is to successfully address the economic challenges facing the country. These challenges concern the need to substantially improve forest governance and to ensure that the forest sector contributes more effectively to the alleviation of poverty and livelihood improvement. While, on paper, the legal framework for community forestry is robust, implementation is falling short due to conflicts over land and resources that have pervaded the Liberian forestry sector for decades. Increased investment in oil palm expansion, artisanal agriculture and broader government-supported logging activities all threaten the implementation of community forestry. Concomitantly, a fundamental lack of capacity at the community level and at the level of the Forestry Department has curtailed early attempts to operationalize community forestry in the country. In this chapter we explore the evolution and development of community forestry in Liberia, and assess prospects for its future implementation. We provide a clear framework of recommendations to address potential constraints to its success.
Tag: community forestry
Intensity and embeddedness: Two dimensions of equity approaches in multi-stakeholder forums
This occasional paper presents a new approach to examining how multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) on land use and land-use change address equity. Based on a review of cases in the scholarly literature, we engage with MSFs from two key characteristics: the degree to which an MSF includes local peoples as part of a forest-landscape solution (its intensity), and the degree to which an MSF and/or its goals or objectives are embedded or entangled in wider societal or governmental programs and processes (its embeddedness).
Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) have been positioned as a transformative solution for more sustainable decision making in forestry, land use, and climate change interventions. Yet, we propose that an MSF’s resilience and potential to promote equity is impeded if local peoples are not regarded as key partners rather than ‘beneficiaries’, and if the forum and/or its outcomes are not meaningfully institutionalized.
Intensity and embeddedness are useful analytical tools that go beyond typologies that identify characteristics found in successful MSFs. They are helpful in terms of explaining how different approaches across different contexts function and add nuance to simplified dichotomies. The analytical application of intensity and embeddedness to the analysis of MSFs permits new insights as they describe cases and explain how they differ in terms of equity.
¿Cómo vamos? A tool to support more equitable co-management of Peru’s protected areas
Key messages
- Comparative research in four countries has shown that multistakeholder forums (MSFs) are viewed across sectors as a means of fostering a ‘transformational change’ that will address the environmental and social impacts of the climate crisis.
- In Peru, the Protected Areas Service (SERNANP) requires the establishment of management committees (MCs) or MSFs involving various stakeholders in the management of protected areas.
- CIFOR and SERNANP co-developed and tested the tool ¿Cómo vamos? (How are we doing?), which enables participatory
reflective monitoring in MSFs. The tool was tested with eight of SERNANP’s MCs. - Given the positive reception and widespread interest in the tool by stakeholders, SERNANP decided to publish the tool as one of its official documents and to stipulate its annual implementation by the MCs of its 75 protected areas.
- This brief details the findings of an assessment to understand and verify the adoption, outcomes and potential impacts of the tool in Peru.
Trust-building and leadership in multi-stakeholder forums: Lessons from Indonesia
Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are coordination spaces that enable discussions, negotiations, and joint planning between different kinds of actors. Proponents of MSFs claim that bringing different actors to the same table may help solve complex problems. Nevertheless, an MSF’s process and outcomes are affected by its leadership and whether participants are able to trust each other. This paper examines the influence of trust and leadership in three MSFs addressing land and resource use in three subnational jurisdictions in Indonesia. The comparative analysis of semi-structured and Q-methodology interviews carried out with MSF participants and non-participants demonstrates the following. First, that the presence of conflicting interests of different stakeholders can hinder trust-building and cooperation. Understanding the historical relationships between stakeholders, including any positive informal relationships, is necessary to build a better strategy to handle antagonism and improve collaboration. Second, different challenges within MSFs require different kinds of leadership. A shared leadership may work in an MSF with participants with a history of positive relationships. A charismatic leader is preferable in MSFs with conflicts of interest or where participants are yet to trust each other.
Can multi-stakeholder forums mediate indigenous rights and development priorities? Insights from the Peruvian Amazon
The protection of indigenous peoples in isolation and initial contact (PIACI) is one of the most complex issues in the human rights and environmental agenda. The implementation of frameworks to protect PIACI involves addressing conflicts by the advance of public and private initiatives and interests in their territories. This article focuses on PIACI Roundtable, a multi-stakeholder forum (MSF) established in Peru’s Loreto region to contribute to protecting these groups. The MSF sought to address the long-standing delays in the creation of five Indigenous Reserves for PIACI in Loreto’s forests. The article argues that MSFs may be fruitful spaces to raise awareness of the rights of vulnerable peoples and coordinate the implementation of supporting actions, but only when participants hold a shared respect for those recognised rights. If not, MSFs may become spaces where powerful actors relegate recognised rights to a perspective among others.
Agroforestry Systems and Their Contribution to Supplying Forest Products to Communities in the Chure Range, Central Nepal
Agroforestry (AF), an integration of agricultural and/or pastureland and trees, is a powerful tool for the maximization of profit from a small unit of land; however, it has been less well explored and recognized by existing policies. AF could be the best approach to conserving the fragile soils of Chure and to supplying subsistence needs to the local people. This study endeavored to understand how the adoption of various AF practices contributed to people’s livelihoods in the Bakaiya rural municipality of Makawanpur District. To achieve this, 5 focus group discussions, 10 key informant interviews and 100 household surveys were conducted. These were analyzed using various statistical analysis tools: Kruskal–Wallis test, Games–Howell post hoc comparison test and Wilcoxon test. Thematic analysis was employed to understand the status and growth process of AF in the study area. Of three different AF systems used in the area, agri-silviculture was found to be the dominant form. Local people derived forest products, especially fuelwood, fodder and leaf litter from AF, where agri-silvi-pasture was most common. The three AF systems studied here were in turn compared with community forestry (CF), which is a participatory forest management system overseen by the community. People derived almost 75% of fuelwood from CF, whereas in the case of fodder and leaf litter, contributions from CF and AF were almost equal. Despite the potentiality of AF in fulfilling the demands of local people, promotional and development activities were lacking. This study recommends a strong collaboration of local people and concerned stakeholders for the promotion and technical facilitation of AF systems.
Crowdsourced Water Level Monitoring in Kenya’s Sondu-Miriu Basin—Who Is “The Crowd”?
Citizen science is gaining popularity as a way to engage people to participate in environmental projects. In addition to potential challenges regarding data quality and the choice of variables, a key factor in the success of participatory monitoring projects is the active participation of volunteers, the “citizen scientists.” To learn more about the motivation of citizen scientists to participate and their socio-economic background, a telephone survey was implemented with participants of a citizen science water level monitoring program in the Sondu-Miriu basin, western Kenya. We analyzed the data using descriptive statistics and random forest models to elucidate the characteristics of the participant population, underlying motivations, and the challenges and opportunities to develop recommendations for sustainable community-based water monitoring programs. As citizen scientists who engaged long-term were 30–49 years old, had primary or secondary school education and passed by the monitoring station frequently, targeting sensitization activities at people with such background could increase participation in community-based water monitoring. Sensitization meetings were key in engaging long-term volunteers, but participants indicated that continued feedback through education and communication of the project findings is required to keep volunteers motivated. The use of cellphone credit to submit data was identified as challenge for participation, highlighting the need for data submission methods that do not incur costs for the participants. Greater volunteer support could also be achieved by active involvement of the members of Water Resource Users Associations, since membership increased the likelihood of continuous engagement in water monitoring under the participants. Furthermore, many participants indicated that their motivation was to help water management and conservation, as most people rely directly on rivers for their water supply. Providing a platform to contribute to better water resources management could therefore result in direct benefits (e.g., improved water supply) for the participants, and thus an incentive to participate actively.
Forest tenure pathways to gender equality: A practitioner’s guide
This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government
administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.
This sourcebook provides multiple forms of guidance from: conceptual ideas, operational direction, good practices, case-study insights, research findings and resources for further exploration from across Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is designed to support a wide range of practitioners, women and men, from a range of institutions such as government offices, non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, donor agencies, women’s organizations, as well as networks and federations. This includes gender experts who are responsible for the integration of gender equality and women’s empowerment in their respective organizations, and also those working broadly in the world of land tenure, forest tenure and governance, forest landscape restoration, agroforestry, value-chain development and social impact enterprises.
The goal is to journey along the pathways to forest tenure reform through a three-step process: Analyze, Strategize and Realize. Focused diagnostic analysis to create an empirical foundation for change can support the design of sequential interventions to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform at various scales. To this end, the guide is a timely resource to support high-impact interventions suited to accelerating change within the national and local context in community-based forest tenure regimes.
Contents
Acknowledgments and The Practitioner’s Guide in a nutshell
- Gender-responsive accelerators for forest tenure reform
- With gender in mind: Forest tenure policy, legal reform and
government administration - Gender matters in community-based forest tenure
Training handbooks:
A global analysis of the social and environmental outcomes of community forests
Community forest management (CFM) has been promoted for decades as a way to merge environmental conservation with economic development and natural resource rights agendas. Yet many of these initiatives have also led to substantial socioeconomic and environmental trade-offs. We present a comprehensive global analysis of environmental, income and natural resource rights outcomes of CFM, using data from 643 cases in 51 countries. We find that while the majority of cases reported positive environmental and income-related outcomes, forest access and resource rights were often negatively affected by policies to formalize CFM, countering one of CFM’s principal goals. Positive outcomes across all three dimensions were rare. We show that biophysical conditions, de facto tenure rights, national context, user-group characteristics and intervention types are key predictors of joint positive outcomes. These findings highlight key conducive conditions for CFM interventions, which can inform CFM design to ensure positive outcomes across multiple sustainability dimensions.
Organizing farmers for effective training and capacitation for tree-based enterprises
Since the adoption of a nationwide community-based forest management strategy 25 years ago, people’s organizations (POs) have been the Philippine Government’s key partners in programs and projects in upland communities, including the Natural Resources Management Program (NRMP), the Environment and Natural Resources Sectoral Adjustment Loan Program (ENR-SECAL), and the Community-Based Resource Management Program (CBRMP). These programs have provided important lessons that have served as the foundation for recent Government initiatives. In 2018, a PO accreditation system was pioneered through the Integrated Natural Resources and Environmental Management Project (INREMP). This innovative mechanism to improve disbursement and increase POs’ capacity to facilitate high-quality sub-projects has, however, been confronted with implementation challenges. This brief suggests concrete actions to increase the capacity of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and POs and to simplify the complex process for POs to support their transformation into small, community-based enterprises.