Routledge Handbook of Community Forestry

Janette Bulkan, John Palmer, Anne M. Larson, Mary Hobley, Janette Bulkan, John Palmer, Anne M. Larson, Mary Hobley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367488697
• eBook ISBN: 9781000594669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview and cutting-edge assessment of community forestry.

Containing contributions from academics, practitioners, and professionals, the Routledge Handbook of Community Forestry presents a truly global overview with case studies drawn from across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Handbook begins with an overview of the chapters and a discussion of the concept of community forestry and the key issues. Topics as wide-ranging as Indigenous forestry, conservation and ecosystem management, relationships with industrial forestry, trade and supply systems, land tenure and land grabbing, and climate change are addressed. The Handbook also focuses on governance, looking at the range of approaches employed, including multi-level governance and rights-based approaches, and the principal actors involved from local communities and Indigenous Peoples to governments and national and international non-governmental organisations. The Handbook reveals the importance of the historical context to community forestry and the effects of power and politics. Importantly, the Handbook not only focuses on successful examples of community forestry, but also addresses failures in order to highlight the key challenges we are still facing and potential solutions.

The Routledge Handbook of Community Forestry is essential reading for academics, professionals, and practitioners interested in forestry, natural resource management, conservation, and sustainable development.

1 Introduction

Janette Bulkan, John Palmer, Anne M. Larson, and Mary Hobley

DOI: 10.4324/9780367488710-1

After centuries as a recognised and documented means of livelihood and sustained forest production in many regions, community forestry (CF) took the international stage in the 1980s. But two decades later it had largely faded from global discourse. Perhaps this was due to the scholars who declared it a ‘failure’ (Blaikie, 2006), or perhaps it simply followed the traditional ups and downs of global trends in forests, as new ideas, or at least new labels, arose in its place. Interestingly, however, CF has in practice continued to grow and to change shape, and even to re-emerge in relation to new global priorities in light of climate heating, such as REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). We might even say that growing concerns over climate change and catastrophic biodiversity losses have dovetailed – with some success (Block, 2021) – with the growing demand for formal recognition of land and resource rights by Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC), potentially giving community forestry new life and new meaning.

The case studies presented in the 31 chapters of this Handbook are drawn from all the continents excepting Antarctica. The Handbook is not a conspectus of current projects or of formal statistically designed trials of CF. While several chapters take note of the International Institute for Environment and Development’s (IIED) focus on markets to make community and smallholder forestry a viable source of local livelihoods, the Handbook does not duplicate the long-running series of studies by the IIED on community-managed forests. Instead, the Handbook offers a broad overview of many variations of CF, each embedded in distinct governance structures. Some chapters present case studies (both successful and unsuccessful in terms of their original goals), while others show how evolution in national and international environmental politics shapes the ways in which Indigenous, forest-dependent people(s) and ‘communities of interest’ present themselves to the dominant governance structures, and how such re-envisioning in turn contributes to political evolution, redress of historic injustices and marginalisation and ecosystem resilience.

Geopolitical and economic contexts influence local outcomes

The resurgence of CF from the 1980s globally is told from distinct points of view in several of the case studies, providing a record of differences in national interpretation and an update of international and national policies. The case studies reflect both their own history and those of the legal, institutional, and governance processes in which they are embedded. CF has grown and flourished when official policies are buttressed with institutional, financial, and technical support. In cases where governments and/or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) remain supportive, robust community forest enterprises (CFE) have endured. Conversely, community forestry has diminished when external support, whether governmental or non-governmental, is reduced or withdrawn unless the CF is linked closely with agricultural support systems.

The human population of the world is growing, human aspirations to greater material comfort and better food are increasing, and demand for industrial wood fibre to manufacture products in support of a better life is rising. The wood fibre is increasingly produced by large-scale forest plantations run as single-minded commercial businesses. While some of these businesses have accepted the need to integrate environmental sustainability and social obligations into their industrial planning, others seek to shed such concerns through offsetting contracts with third parties. This still leaves large areas of forest, especially natural forest ecosystems, where there are multiple categories of legitimate stakeholders with interests in a wide range of material products and environmental services from the forests, and thus a single-product factory style of management is neither appropriate nor workable. Several chapters in this Handbook delve into contemporary examples of such CF on several continents.

Forests managed by communities whose livelihoods are more or less dependent on the continued existence of a productive forest ought to demonstrate the benefits of short decision chains and geographical proximity to the target forest. Monitoring by a variety of concerned stakeholders should be more frequent, and a variety of perspectives about desired outcomes should be more articulated than in forests managed by (remote) governments or single-minded commercial companies. Some chapters examine the costs and consequences of monitoring, from local to global levels, including by independent third-party certification schemes.

The case studies of resilient CFEs, described in some of the chapters, demonstrate the interlocking roles of actors, institutions, supportive public policies and good governance. In contrast, other chapters illustrate the reversal of earlier gains and progressive re-centralisation of government control in several countries – e.g., in the global North (Chapter 2, Bouthillier, Chiasson & Beaulieu) and South (Chapter 26, Ramcilovic-Suominen & Mustalahti). Even the term ‘community forestry’ was disallowed by the government of Laos in the 1990s when international donors were negotiating support for Laotian forest policy reform: the government ‘associate it with an overly progressive socio-economic and political agenda in terms of villagers’ rights and ownership … which the government perceives as politically disruptive’. Instead, the Laotian government decreed the use of two alternative terms: ‘participatory sustainable forest management’ (PSFM) and ‘village forest management’ (or ‘village forestry’). Chapter 26 chronicles the Laotian government’s erosion of customary rights to forests as one undesirable aspect of the REDD+ programme, which it signed up to in 2008, and the acquiescence of international donors in that erosion.

Stakeholders

A common thread in case studies of genuine community forestry are the relationships that link groups of people – in a geographic community or distinct constituencies in communities of interest – with each other and in the stewardship of specific forest or urban ‘green space’ (Chapter 32, Arts, Mattijssen & Wiersum). Stakeholders (‘actors’, ‘constituents’) are categorised as ‘affected’ or ‘interested’ in a range of international processes. The insistence of Indigenous communities that they are ‘rightsholders’, and not stakeholders, is grounded in their relationship to their ancestral territory from time immemorial. In contrast, non-Indigenous persons or communities have rights that are contingent on codified law and policy (Booth & Muir, 2013). An affected stakeholder(s) is/are a person, group of persons or entity whose long-term welfare is/are likely to be dependent or subject to the effects of the activities or who has/have an emotional/lived connection (care or shared identity) in a locally important or customarily claimed forest area. An ‘interested’ stakeholder is any person, group of persons or entity that is linked in a transaction or an activity relating to a forest area, but who does/do not have a long-term dependency on that forest area.

Long-term dependency on a forest area, wholly or partly for income and livelihood, is generally directly impacted by forest management; hence the increasing insistence by local communities, however constituted, to have a say in decisions taken regarding their local forests. The terms care or shared identity have to do with perspective and intrinsic values. In practice, as several of the chapters illustrate, lasting community forest management (CFM) or CFEs generally depend on both affected and interested stakeholders working together in the core group, and serving as a bridge, across scale (geographic) and levels (institutional and jurisdictional), to personnel, resources, skills, and information.

The roles of ‘interested’ foreign stakeholders are considered critically in some CF examples. Ece et al. examined a range of externally driven forestry programmes in Africa, including REDD+ and the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF). They assert that

participatory and ‘free, prior and informed consent’ processes rarely reflect local needs and aspirations, they are rarely democratic and they do not permit participants to make significant decisions – such as whether or how the project will take place. The intervening agents’ choices of local partners are based on expedience, naïve notions of who can speak for local people, anti-government and pro-market ideologies informed by a comfort with expert rule. Although elected local governments are present in all cases in our study, they are systematically circumvented. Instead, project committees, non-governmental organisations, customary authorities, and local forestry department offices are recognised as representatives and technical project objectives are favoured over the democratic representation

(Chapter 24, Ece, Murombedzi & Ribot).

One response from donors is that this is often a matter of compliance with accounting rules biasing connections towards the stakeholders who understand the need for monitoring of financial indicators or means of verification.

The expanded scope of ‘community’

The emergence of new thinking on what constitutes a ‘community’ is examined in several chapters. Turning to the global North, a number of chapters explore the promise held out by CF led by ‘communities of interest’, rather than the more traditional geographic or place-based communities. Arts et al. argue that ‘while pertinent to the Dutch context … our proposed reconceptualisation of community forestry to community-based green space management characterised by a sense of shared identity may offer value for cases in other economically developed countries too’ (Chapter 32).

In Scotland (Chapter 31, Lawrence), legislation is based on the idea of the community body, often a non-profit company. The concepts of equality of access (to membership and decision-making) and community...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Spaces for community forestry in State- and timber-dominated landscapes
• PART II Multi-level governance and new governance approaches – Global
• PART III Inter-agency collaborations in Community Forestry – USA
• PART IV Voluntary forest certification schemes in community forestry
• PART V Indigenous forestry/all forest values including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
• PART VI Community forestry associations, gender, landscapes
• PART VII Politics and power in community forestry
• PART VIII New directions in community forestry
• Index