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 later followed by a shift from centralized to decentralized forest management in the form of community forestry and JFM. In the context of India, which is the birthplace of social forestry, the term is applied in a more narrow sense to state-sponsored tree-growing programs on unused or degraded land.

In India, a social forestry program was initiated by the National Commission on Agriculture in the 1970s, and it provided the framework for subsequent forest legislation, such as the Forest Policy of 1988, which recognized local users’ rights and stated that forests were no longer to be managed for revenue generation only, and the contemporary JFM policy, which was drafted in 1990. However, Dietrich Brandis, Inspector General of Forests in India from 1864 to 1883, can be considered the first proponent of social and community forestry in India. Contrary to most members of the British Colonial Forest Service, who pursued a policy of putting forests under government control, Brandis believed in the capacity of local communities to manage their resources and advocated a parallel system of commercially important state reserves managed by the Forest Department and village forests outside of state reserves managed by farmers in collaboration with Forest Department rangers. He published a series of reports on this issue from 1868 onward, which led to a proposal to provide scope for community management of forests under the 1878 Forest Act. Brandis's proposal was rejected, however, and the 1878 Forest Act was firmly based on the principle of state monopoly over forests.

The concept of forestry for local people was resuscitated in India following popular protests against state forest policies, which started in 1904, took the form of a forest movement with labor strikes and the burning of forests in 1921, and culminated in the Chipko Movement of the 1970s against the logging of pine forests. The government of independent India, which had initially attempted to continue the policy of the British administration of maintaining or even increasing control over forests, backed down and started a process of developing policies for integration of and collaboration with local users.

The practice of social forestry in the context of India can be defined as growing trees on all land available for the purpose, especially on land outside traditional forest areas, with involvement of the local people and with a view to reduce pressure on forests and to provide a wide range of goods and services for local users, especially fuel and fodder. Tree-growing programs on unused land, such as along roadsides and reservoir walls, were pioneered by several states, for example, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. In 1985, a National Wastelands Development Board (NWDB) was [Page 2564]created to coordinate tree growing on degraded or unused land on a national scale. The practice of social forestry was criticized as an attempt by the state forest departments to extend their control onto land outside their domain, but it also brought onto the scene international donors, especially the Swedish Sida, and nongovernmental organizations, which engaged in social forestry programs all over India. Social forestry programs in India were also criticized for the selection of controversial tree species such as the eucalyptus and for allowing only a limited scope for community participation.

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