Social Forestry

Social forestry belongs in the same category with terms such as community forestry, joint forest management (JFM), and farm forestry, but it is not synonymous with them. The term social forestry was first used by Jack Westoby in his address to the Ninth Commonwealth Forestry Congress at Delhi, India, in 1968—“Changing Objectives of Forest Management”—and subsequently at the 1978 Eighth World Forestry Congress in Jakarta, Indonesia. Influential papers heralding a change in forestry were also published by the World Bank and by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In this context, social forestry stands for a shift of focus in forestry in developing countries away from production-oriented and revenue generation–oriented forestry toward forestry for the needs of local users. This was ...