Community Forestry

Community forestry is an approach to forest conservation and management in which forest inhabitants participate in management activities and ideally enjoy the economic and livelihood benefits. Community forestry contrasts with exclusionary models of forestry, including logging concessions to large firms and national parks that prohibit most human uses.

Community forestry appeared in the context of three broad social trends. First, there was the late 20th-century context of political change, including the widespread replacement of authoritarian regimes with democracies throughout the world and the rise of neoliberal development policies that encouraged states to decentralize, deregulate, privatize, and generally withdraw from many traditional management activities. Second, the analysis of conservation and forestry projects repeatedly identified social conflicts between managers and forest residents that often jeopardized conservation goals. Third, there were increasingly influential social movements of indigenous people and other traditional forest inhabitants demanding greater autonomy and self-determination. Within this context, states have increasingly recognized the legitimacy of forest residents' land claims, and in some cases, implement forest regulatory structures that permit forest inhabitants to participate in forest management. In other cases, states maintain forest ownership but grant concessions to communities, or create joint management arrangements between forest departments and local groups. In addition, many communities still occupy and manage forests without official state sanction, but they risk suddenly finding their forests scheduled for logging or exclusionary preservation.

Community forestry also varies greatly in the rights of communities to benefit from forests. In many countries, timber is one of the few forest values recognized by existing markets, but it is rare for states to recognize full community rights to its commercial use. Where economic benefits are denied, community forestry is little more than a way for states to dump environmental management responsibilities on communities while granting the rights to economic benefits to forest departments, or other privileged, noncommunity actors.