Community Forestry

Participation and Building Community Capacities

Colonial administration of forestlands in developing countries led to the breakdown of traditional local natural resource management institutions, degradation of forest ecosystems, and impoverishment of local peoples. While conservation and poverty alleviation programs were implemented after independence from colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s, it was clear that they were failing. Professional foresters, conservationists, and development practitioners began questioning state control of forestlands. They advocated reorienting forestry to management for multiple forest values, and to ensure that this new management benefited local peoples, they called for participation by community members in defining how forests should be understood and managed. A decade later, similar reasoning was applied in the United States, where communities experience limited access to forest resources, restricted opportunities for participation in forest decision making, and, at that time, heightened conflict over logging and endangered species protection. In hundreds of communities across the United States, local residents, scholars, and land management professionals have come together seeking innovative ways to collaborate on forest management.

Community members often need new skills to navigate the current global political economy, and capacity building is a central component of community forestry. Nicholas Menzies observes that community members need capacities in five areas: (1) building local institutions for setting priorities and mediating conflicts, (2) representing their interests in wider social and political arenas, (3) managing resources sustainably, (4) participating as informed actors in markets, and (5) building community assets with benefits derived from managing the resource.

Building local capacities requires working with community members as equal partners and reshaping relationships of power so that local people are positioned to make decisions about policy formulation and implementation. Participatory research developed hand in hand with community forestry as a means of increasing community capacities. When done well, it facilitates mutual learning among professionals and community members in ways that can, under the right conditions, enhance community members’ ability to apply research results to improve their situation. Yet people in positions of authority—whether local, regional, or national—are often reluctant to relinquish power. Communities, state agencies, and other interested parties worldwide struggle to negotiate the equitable distribution of rights, powers, and responsibilities.

Because of unique combinations of historical, economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental factors, these negotiations lead to unique tenure and sociopolitical arrangements in every place. Some examples of the multiple forms of community forestry include joint forest management in India, in which state forest agencies and local communities share rights and responsibilities for forest management; communal ownership of land in Guatemala; and collaboration among government agencies, community groups, environmental organizations, and lumber companies on the management of U.S. public lands. Whatever the case, the central concerns common to all community forestry efforts are clearly defining rights of access to forest resources, specifying protocols for participation in decision making, and enforcing rules to ensure that forest use is sustainable so that it is economically efficient, socially equitable, and environmentally sound. To community members, this often means working to maintain a particular way of life.

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