Community Forest Management

by

Sharachchandra Lele, Shruti Mokashi, Anuja Date, Atul Joshi

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199363445-0143

Introduction

Historically, some form of local management of forests existed in many parts of the world in the precolonial era. Enclosures, invasions, colonization, or policies of postcolonial states led to the takeover of most of these forests and a breakdown in local or community management. Traditional forms of such community forestry are perhaps now present only in some parts of South America and Southeast Asia. However, since the 1980s, community forest management (CFM) has (re-)emerged as an important element of forest policy, especially in countries in the Global South, and this forms the focus of this review. CFM has taken many forms involving varying degrees of autonomy for communities and, conversely, state involvement (see General Overview). These variations emerge from the varying rationales for CFM, ranging from arguments from the common pool resource literature (see the Oxford Bibliographies article Common Pool Resources) such as administrative efficiency or conservation effectiveness to rights-based arguments that invoke human rights, rights of indigenous peoples, and democratic rights of local communities over their resources. This diversity, in turn, means that there are diverse definitions of what constitutes successful CFM and ways of measuring it (see subsection on Defining and Measuring Success). Explaining why CFM may succeed or fail is even more challenging and involves economic, institutional, and power-related factors (see section on Factors Influencing Outcomes). Gender discrimination is a particular power-laden process that affects CFM (see section on Gender and Community Forestry). The forms, outcomes, and explanations for CFM also vary enormously by region. Given this diversity and size of the literature, we provide a sampling of the literature from four countries or regions from the Global South (countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, Nepal, and India) where CFM has been extensive, and provide one section on North America and Europe as representing the Global North, where some pockets of CFM exist.

General Overview

The process of enclosures, invasions, colonialism, or policies of postcolonial states that led to the demise of traditional community forestry institutions and state takeover of forests in most countries has been described by Lynch and Talbott 1995 (p. 4) and Guha 2001. The concept of CFM, described by Charnley and Poe 2007 as programs wherein “some degree of responsibility and authority for forest management is formally vested by the government in local communities” (p. 303) (re)-emerged in the 1980s in forest policy in the Global South. Progress on the ground has been slow: estimates of the distribution of forests across tenurial classes, first provided by White and Martin 2002 and updated by Rights and Resources Initiative 2023, indicate that state ownership of forests is still the norm in most countries in the Global South, but some progress towards community management has been made since the 2000s. The term CFM also encompasses a variety of forms and labels, as pointed out by Petheram, et al. 2004 and Gilmour 2016. These include social forestry, participatory forest management, community forestry, collaborative forest management, joint forest management, community-based natural resource management, and co-management. While in some cases (such as social forestry) there was no community involvement at all, the main difference according to Petheram, et al. 2004 is between programs that allow communities some degree of autonomy and others that require continuous consultation with or involvement of state forest agencies (i.e., joint or co-management). Similarly, Ribot, et al. 2006 distinguishes between political decentralization/democratic decentralization/devolution (where the local forest management institution is downwardly accountable) and administrative decentralization or de-concentration (where the local institution remains upwardly accountable). Agrawal and Ostrom 2001 suggested that the former, where local communities are delegated property rights of ownership or proprietorship by the government, is necessary for positive outcomes for both the people and the government. Lélé 2004 argues against thinking of joint or co-management as bridging the gap between purely state and purely community management, and presents a rationale for and possible structure of multi-layered forest governance in place of joint management.

• Agrawal, Arun, and Elinor Ostrom. 2001. Collective action, property rights, and decentralization in resource use in India and Nepal. Politics & Society 29.4: 485–514.

  DOI: 10.1177/0032329201029004002

  Focusing on case studies in India and Nepal, the paper elaborates on the types of property rights given to communities in CFM arrangements. The paper further discusses the different motivations that lead governments to decentralize powers to communities. They suggest that irrespective of whether decentralization was initiated by governments or local demands, maintenance of the reforms need local groups to pursue them and governments need to receive some benefits from these arrangements. The authors suggest that for effective decentralization, at least transfer of ownership or proprietorship rights to local communities is necessary.

• Charnley, Susan, and Melissa R. Poe. 2007. Community forestry in theory and practice: Where are we now? Annual Review of Anthropology 36.1: 301–336.

  DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123143

  Gives an overview of community forestry across the world and specifically the countries in the Americas. Based on a review of several studies the authors argue that though community forestry is a promising approach for conservation of forests and socioeconomic development of the forest community, there are major gaps in the theory of community forestry and its implementation.

• Gilmour, Donald Allan. 2016. Forty years of community-based forestry: A review of its extent and effectiveness. FAO Forestry Paper 176. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

  This FAO report provides a comprehensive review of community-based forestry’s geographic extent and effectiveness. It also outlines key factors essential for its effective implementation.

• Guha, Ramachandra. 2001. The prehistory of community forestry in India. Environmental History 6.2: 213–238.

  DOI: 10.2307/3985085

  This paper points out that the recent push for CFM finds echoes in the colonial past as well. It describes dissenting voices from civil society and within the colonial bureaucracy against the Indian Forest Act of 1878, the strong views of Brandis, the forest service chief, in favor of providing community/village forests, and the eventual experiment with Van Panchayats in Kumaon.

• Lélé, Sharachchandra. 2004. Beyond state-community polarisations and bogus “joint”ness: Crafting institutional solutions for resource management. In Globalisation, poverty and conflict: A critical “development” reader. Edited by Max Spoor, 283–303. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.

  This paper argues that the simplistic polarization of the debate on forest governance into state versus community management and the proposal of joint or co-management as a resolution of this polarization are inadequate. Ecologically, forests provide benefits to local, regional, and global stakeholders. Socially, democratic forest governance requires state support and even regulation. Multi-layered governance is necessary, where autonomous day-to-day management is embedded in a regulatory and supportive framework.

• Lynch, Owen J., and Kirk Talbott. 1995. Balancing acts: Community-based forest management and national law in Asia and the Pacific. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.

  The book reviews forest laws and policies impacting forest-dwelling communities in seven countries. As forest health and forest tenure are inextricably linked, the authors suggest promoting community-based forest management as a solution to increasing deforestation.

• Petheram, R. John, Peter Stephen, and Don Gilmour. 2004. Collaborative forest management: A review. Australian Forestry 67.2: 137–146.

  DOI: 10.1080/00049158.2004.10676217

  This paper uses the term “collaborative forest management” to include all varieties of CFM. It distinguishes between forms of CFM where “government leads” as against where “community leads.” It describes the “drivers” pushing governments to initiate CFM and the challenges in collaboration and the role of power, and then distills main principles from the experience in Asia and Africa to help the initiation of CFM in Australia.

• Ribot, Jesse C., Arun Agrawal, and Anne M. Larson. 2006. Recentralizing while decentralizing: How national governments reappropriate forest resources. World Development 34.11: 1864–1886.

  DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.11.020

  This paper uses a comparative empirical approach to show how central governments in six countries—Senegal, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Nicaragua—use a variety of strategies to obstruct the democratic decentralization of resource management and, hence, retain central control. It argues that effective decentralization requires the construction of accountable institutions at all levels of government and a secure domain of autonomous decision-making at the local level.

• Rights and Resources Initiative. 2023. Who owns the world’s land? Washington, DC: Rights and Resources Initiative.

  This report attempts to identify community-based tenure regimes that are designated for and owned by indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities across the world. The report estimates that 3124.9 M acres, amounting to 11 percent of the global land area (forests, grassland, and other uses), is owned by communities where they have minimum rights to access, withdrawal, exclusion, and/or management. This work is an extension of the first attempt to estimate and classify global forest tenure, White and Martin 2002.

• White, Andy, and Alejandra Martin. 2002. Who owns the world’s forests? Forest tenure and public forests in transition. Washington, DC: Forest Trends.

  This report was the first attempt to provide an estimate of how tenure over forests is distributed within twenty-four of the world’s top thirty forested countries in real terms. It distinguishes between four broad forest tenure categories: “privately owned” land held by either individuals or community, and state-owned land with or without some community access.