In March 1997, the Sustainable Development Institute sent email queries to some 150 people, from twenty-six countries, with a professional interest in promoting the idea of community forest management. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) kindly agreed to provide SDI with the email addresses of the Working Group on Community Involvement in Forest Management, a multistakeholder network facilitated by IUCN. We asked for suggestions and comments about the kinds of national and international level actions and policy shifts that could best strengthen current moves toward greater local control over forests.

On the basis of the many useful responses received, we modified and sharpened the skeleton inventory of ideas we initially circulated.  To the extent possible, the recommendations for actions that follow represent the collective opinion of our respondents.  While they were most generous with their time and thoughts, however, these people were not asked to help form the analysis that backs up the recommendations. For these sections of the paper, the authors are solely responsible.

Introduction

For many centuries in western Europe, rural peasants have waged battles with their national rulers over control of forest resources.   During the nineteenth-century heyday of colonialism, the global swing toward state management of forest resources, and away from local control, accelerated rapidly.  At that time many colonial administrations, and even the national governments of some countries like Thailand that were never colonized, assumed control of forest lands that had long been managed by local people living within or near them.  Most of the new post-colonial nations that became independent during the 1950s and 1960s maintained this shift in management authority.

 Then as before, the state took these actions in order to maintain control over revenues from forest products while masking this motive behind talk of protecting the forest for the public interest and safeguarding the equity of future generations. It is no surprise that government monopolies over forest resource revenues, with a combination of "protection" and production objectives, usually harmed rather than helped the forest and people. Those with a vested interest in sustaining forest resources for local use, often employing time-tested management systems evolved over long periods of time, were compelled to cede their rights to the state and to corporations profiting from wholesale forest destruction through short-term gains of commercial forestry.  Within many nations, the linkages between forest production and corrupt commercial, political, and military elements remain and are well if quietly understood.  In many instances, district officials of national governments have usurped forest power simply as a means of exercising "control" over local communities.

No analysis of global forest degradation reveals simple answers or stark truths etched in black or white.  Evidence mounts, however, that the shift to state management and away from local hands, accompanied by the ascendancy of large-scale commercial logging, are major reasons why global deforestation rates have accelerated in recent decades.  Consequently the importance of reestablishing at least partial local ownership and control over forests is becoming increasingly clear to those in the world community who during the 1990s have been striving to identify new and more promising ways to address forest problems and move the world back toward forest stabilization and security. Community based approaches will not always result in better forest management than state control. Nor will common property regimes , in and of themselves, necessarily provide more equity or protect more forest than systems that protect individual property rights. The community-based approaches to forest resource management is nonetheless a concept that merits far more recognition and experimentation than it has been accorded.

Traditional forest dwellers and other forest-dependent rural people number perhaps one billion of the world's current population of 5.8 billion.  Examples from many nations with widely differing cultures and political systems demonstrate that when such people have access to forest resources they do manage or help manage their forests effectively, and both people and forest often benefit.  Effective communal forest management systems have been in place for centuries in many parts of Africa.   The success of South Korea's village-based forestry program of the 1970s is widely cited in the literature.  In India, the principle of "joint forest management," where forest officials and local communities share management responsibilities, was introduced in the 1970s and has become steadily more popular among local communities and forestry officials. 

In India's West Bengal state, many local communities had reached the abyss of absolute poverty before communities began to organize a system of sharing management and protection responsibilities over local forest resources. Villagers desperately in search of fuelwood had removed the stumps and roots of trees, preventing the trees from coppicing and continuing to supply fuel, and the ensuing search for wood destroyed the watershed capacity of the forests leading to soil erosion and failed crops as well as the loss of non-timber products.  While the underlying causes of these actions have complex political and social links, once communities began to see that they could maintain their resources in perpetuity, they changed their practices. The spontaneous emergence of these systems of shared village responsibilities throughout the state resulted in forest regeneration in many areas, bringing economic improvement to many people. Some communities were even able to begin marketing some of the forest products.

In many other lands, the principle of local  participation in managing forests is taking hold in widely ranging forms ever more often involving genuine partnerships between villagers and representatives of the State.  Many state forest authorities are recognizing that local communities can effectively manage forests.  Community institutions or comanagers as well as smallscale farmers and woodlot owners have often and amply demonstrated their ability to stabilize forests, induce regeneration, and improve local economies at a low cost.  Conversely, without strong local support, forests are not likely to be well managed in areas where people and trees share the same space.

Beyond the local level, the successful promotion of community-based forest management tends to reduce regional and national tensions and the risk of insurrections led by alienated rural elements such as those that have occurred in the Philippines, Indonesia, and India with its often-cited Chipko or "tree-hugger" uprising.  Moreover, the benefits of substantive local participation in managing forests can extend far beyond the borders of individual nations.  Gains in nations' political and economic security lessen the likelihood of conflicts that could affect regions or even the world.  Since trees sequester carbon, a principal cause of the "greenhouse effect" once it enters the atmosphere, managing forests better also promises to reduce the magnitude and impact of global climate change and the generally alarming consequences forecast to accompany the planet's warming.  Protecting forests, the habitat for at least fifty percent of all forms of life on earth, also helps shield the planet's biodiversity from losses even more precipitous than those now being suffered.

Community based forestry is no panacea.  Conflicts between neighboring villages, gender inequities, and simple misunderstandings often inhibit the ability of local institutions to assume management rights and responsibilities.  Such groups are not always automatically capable of, or even interested in, managing forests for sustainable use and to be successful will often require the support of other social actors.  Even if they are adept at forest management and strongly motivated, they need to adapt to a changing world which places many obstacles along the pathway toward success.  Foremost, local communities can seldom gain recognition of community-based property rights or governmental acquiescence that legalizes their occupation and resource usage.  States more readily grant property rights to communities when they do not conflict with private commercial interests, or when the forest is already logged or degraded.  Villagers' land ownership and user rights often overlap and are difficult to document legally.

Even when governments or donors attempt to set rules or policies to increase local participation, power sometimes falls into the hands of local elements with no greater interest than the state in protecting the forest.  Local officials and private concessioners often disregard policies calling for community empowerment, and fail to transfer real management authority.  Aid donors and others who help establish new policies supporting community-based natural resource management often look the other way when they are ignored.  Mainstream bureaucrats in government forestry departments often prove inflexible and unwilling to share power.  Many forest officers continue to see their role as defenders of the forest from local people.  Aid donors, governments, and NGOs all have much to learn about how to support the process of devolution and fashion a closer relationship between dollars applied and success in the field.

And as yet, for all the strides forward that have been made, only a tiny fraction of all the world's forests have come under community management.  Even in India, where the principle of community forestry is well rooted, local communities currently share control of no more than 1.5 percent of the nation's forest territory.  With only an estimated one percent of all the world's forests now being managed sustainably, the promising concept of local forest management has far to go before it begins to stem the tide of global forest decline.

After a lapse that followed the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro, forests have returned to the international policy agenda.  During the latter part of the decade close attention to forest policy was being paid by the United Nations' Commission on Sustainable Development and also by the independent World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development, which late in 1998 is due to issue a comprehensive report calling for major forest policy reforms.  The World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the World Resources Institute have all initiated major new forests campaigns.  Official discussion of the forests issue continues under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests, due to report its findings to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in 2000.

Hence this is a critical moment to promote new ideas about how to manage the world's forests better.  Many groups, especially the Mexico-based Forest Stewardship Council, seek remedies within the massive system of global trade in wood and wood products.  In many nations, notably including Japan and Brazil, buyers' groups are forming to limit purchases of tropical hardwoods to those certified as having been sustainably harvested.   The importance of these efforts cannot be overemphasized.  But since well over half of all the wood the world consumes never leaves its country of origin, and almost half of it is gathered locally for use as fuel, even the most effective international trade measures touch only a portion of the problem.  In this paper we offer thoughts about measures to strengthen the hand of local communities within nations, thus addressing the issue  more completely and more directly.

Recommended Actions

What follows is a catalogue of ideas, along with a  rationale for each and indications of institutions in a position to bring them to life.  Some of the proposed actions can be accomplished only at the local or at the national level; some require the involvement of the international community.  Since many can benefit from activity at both levels, they are presented thematically rather than by political level in the categories that follow.

Property Rights and Legal Arrangements

Managing the world's forests sustainably will often require states to delegate legal control, and the responsibility for the protection and sustainable management of forest ecosystems,  to forest dependent communities.  What specifically should be done varies from country to country.   The important first step is to engage stakeholders in effective dialogue. The initiation of processes for management, planning, and for the resolution of conflicts over rights is often as valuable or more so than promulgating new legislation. Enacting new laws may not even be required and in any event is only the beginning: enforcement is what counts.  All that said, these principles should prevail in the many countries where the recognition of community-based rights and the granting of state rights to local resource users is not already well advanced:

• Legal rights recognized and/or granted to local communities should democratically formalize  local control, not facilitate the extension of the national government authority to the local level or invest power in inappropriate local hands.  In countries as disparate as Brazil and Papua New Guinea, local politicians have proven to be even less responsible forest stewards than their national counterparts.  Nepal's community forestry program became effective only after the state stopped empowering local political units called panchayats and began to support forest user groups within communities.
• New arrangements empowering local communities need sufficient flexibility to encompass situations where community management cannot or will not work, and where smallholders of individual property rights are also important forest stewards capable of taking on responsibility for sustainable forest management.  Europe's twelve million smallholder forest stewards are an example. But even in countries where common property regimes are likely to be more effective safeguards, the Western idea that private individual rights are the key to responsible forest use continues to be exclusively upheld.  In such instances, a better legal balance between these two principles needs to be struck.
• In many societies, tree tenure and land tenure are traditionally separate matters: the person or group controlling the land may or may not control the trees on it, and vice versa.  State owners yielding user rights to local communities, while remaining respectful of these customs, should make sure that the rights conferred apply not only to land, but to trees and other forest resources, and help communities market those resources sustainably.   The expansion of areas to protect wildlife and preserve biodiversity and genetic resources should involve the full participation of local communities and the establishment of practices that respect the needs of traditional human users of the forest as well as the importance of conserving forest ecosystems for present and future generations.
• Counter-productive laws regarding nature as an enemy, encouraging deforestation by declaring forested lands to be "idle," empty, or territorium nullius, and therefore subject to tax or tenurial inequities, remain in force in many countries.  Some regimes award land tenure rights on the basis of demonstrated use--that is, forest clearing.  The beginning of forest wisdom is to repeal such laws, where they exist, and substitute or strengthen ones promoting the conservation and sustainable management of forest ecosystems.

International Donors can directly do little to generate internal domestic support for such measures. They can help by:

• Being selective about supporting individual land titling efforts, usually limiting these to urban peripheries and often encouraging the formation of community land trusts as alternatives to individual registrations.
• Backing national level research and policy advocacy efforts to remove the legal constraints to, and create legal incentives for, sustainable community based forest management. They should emphasize the development of public interest environmental law institutions that focus on the problems, potentials and aspirations of rural resource users, including forest-dependent communities.  In many parts of the developing world, NGOs are following the U.S. example in using and changing the law as a means of achieving environmental progress.  This trend requires the maximum possible encouragement.

Planning 

 In lands as disparate as the United States and Indonesia, forest agencies get buried within larger state bureaucracies. They suffer from underfunding and lack of visibility as well as from orientation toward the goal of "production" rather than of maintaining forest ecosystem integrity.]  Independence and greater visibility for forest agencies would in many instances bring better balance to the equation, and more forest-sensitive policies and strategies.

But the problem is broader than this.  Even if forest departments had more strength, the fact would remain that forest issues tend too often to be considered by foresters whose concern is forestry--the planting, management, and harvesting of trees.  What is required not just better forest management by foresters.  It is an integrated approach to planning for rural development in which forests are assessed for all their uses and services, not just for their potential as suppliers of timber.  Within the framework of such a broader and more comprehensive approach, these more specific steps would especially benefit the world's forest-dwelling and forest-dependent local communities:

• In carrying out the essential task of integrating participatory forest management mechanisms into national development planning, policymaking, and implementation mechanisms, national governments must respect the need to involve authentic community-based institutions with traditions of forest stewardship.  It will normally not benefit forests, or traditional forest users, to strengthen local branches of national agencies or local political units (e.g. the panchayats of India and Nepal) that represent all people within a region and may not be sensitive to forest priorities.
• Planning for forests and agriculture needs far more careful coordination both at the national level and at the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. Designated as the U.N. agency responsible for forests, FAO is overwhelmingly biased toward agriculture and needs to emphasize the forest sector (especially community forestry and its Forests, Trees, and People Program) to a far greater extent.
• Aid donors should include forest communities as participants in planning not only forestry activities, but also agricultural and other rural development projects. Social Impact Assessments, openly and transparently conducted, should be required prerequisites. Field projects should be implemented in a transparent and participatory manner.  In their calculations, aid donors would do well to consider the many examples of how forest regeneration can bring economic as well as environmental progress to many rural communities.

Education and Training

In the future, sound forest management at the village level will increasingly benefit from relatively complex but useful new technologies and procedures from GIS mapping systems to PRA assessments.  Mastering these skills requires new kinds of education and training.  In cases where communities plan to use forest holdings for commercial purposes as well as for subsistence, business management and marketing capabilities become important.  All those involved in the hands-on practice of local forest management, whether they be regional government officials, NGO field workers or community leaders, can benefit greatly from training in planning, meeting facilitation, and consensus building.  Training centers provide fora to bridge the gaps between NGO's, government officials, and communities.

These benefits come over and above the essential need, which cannot be overstated, for training in basic forestry and agroforestry techniques.  No document of this sort is complete without stressing the importance of capacitybuilding for communities and specifically designed for them. We especially note these needs:

• A major emphasis should be a quantum increase in governments' and NGOs' capacity to train and sensitize regional forest department officials.  Within forest services, states one scholar, "real progress is likely to happen only when field staff feel themselves to be involved, and committed to the new approaches."  The Regional Community Forestry Training Center (RECOFTC) at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, which itself grew out of a recommendation made at a meeting on local forest management, has established credentials in this sector as well as in building bridges between government agencies and NGOs.  This is a model that merits careful analysis and at least partial replication in East and Central Africa, West Africa, Central America, the tropical Andes, and the Amazon basin.
• Since most field foresters receive their training in conventional colleges or agencies, donors should also allocate extra support to these neglected institutions to improve and broaden their curricula and leadership abilities.
• NGOs have become increasingly effective as bridges between forest communities, national governments, and international agencies, demonstrating their growing ability to work both at the grassroots level and in the international arena.  But they too need to refine their skills.  Too many development oriented NGOs lack environmental sensitivities.  Environmental NGOs still often send out field biologists to organize complex social engineering projects requiring extra training in development and management techniques.  Developing country representatives often criticize international and northern NGOs for placing their own needs above those of the clientele they are there to assist; these tendencies must be curbed, and training once again can help.
• Donors should also magnify their support for NGOdirected efforts to improve the skills of leaders within forest dwelling communities.

Donor Policies

Until the 1990s, international aid donors and lenders channeled almost all funds through national and state governments and tended to allocate forest sector support to very expensive and often environmentally harmful commercial forestry projects.  Sometimes heavy damage to forests still results from dams, highways, and other non-forestry projects supported by international donors. Pressures to increase exports imposed by structural adjustment agreements have hastened forest decline in nations with weak natural resource policies and institutions.  In some instances, countries feel obliged to accelerate their efforts to export forest products; in others, they encourage forest clearing to make way for alternative ventures that quickly generate export income.

In the forest sector, policy modifications have shifted the emphasis sharply in recent years and reduced the extent of environmental damage done to forests as a direct consequence of international aid.  Local participation has become an aid donor policy mantra.  Perhaps more for political than for technical reasons, however, the new policies and mandated practices are not always observed in the field.  Because the situation is changing so rapidly, and because there are now so many emerging opportunities for donors to spend less and do more to protect the world's forests by helping to empower local forest communities, there are compelling reasons for them to try far harder to monitor, evaluate, and improve their efforts in the field.

Among the principles they should adopt or adhere to more scrupulously:

• Before demanding structural adjustment and other reforms, the World Bank and IMF should carefully assess whether they carry the risk of promoting unsustainable natural resource policies, and take remedial actions if this is the case.
• In planning projects, aid donors including large NGOs should favor beneficiary priorities over their own institutional requirements, learning more about how to downgrade their concern for short-term payback or quick recognition and think for the longer term.  They need to become far more supportive, open-ended, flexible, and responsive to local needs, working at a smaller scale and in smaller grant increments.
• Donors should shift from a project to a program emphasis.  Rather than commit large amounts to intricately designed field activities whose managers and results are beyond their reach, they should move toward less expensive but more rewarding long run sector investment programs.  They should emphasize education, training, building communications skills, and trusting others more.
• Donors should be less involved in microplanning at local levels, leaving such tasks in the hands of community-based institutions, well intentioned intermediary NGOs (if available) or properly motivated government institutions.  These smaller agencies should participate in the bottom-up planning and modeling exercises, but local people should play the leading roles in visioning their future and ways to progress as steps toward community forestry grant making.
• Since it will often take a long time for good projects to be developed through participatory and transparent processes, donors are well advised not to act precipitously with regard both to planning and to funding. 
• Aid agencies should seek opportunities to apply strong bilateral, project by project conditionalities having to do with devolution, equity, and local participation.  When they are imposed, such conditionalities should be grounded in the justified demands of local civil society groups and progressive government agencies.  But conditionalities sometimes backfire, bringing accusations that donors lack sensitivity to recipient needs and cultures.  When this sort of friction seems likely, aid agencies are better advised to avoid conditionalities in favor of selectivity.  In this approach, the donor clearly establishes the ground rules for support.  It works only with those countries that agree to them in advance, and have already manifested their commitment to common goals.
• Donors should try harder to establish whether their own task managers are observing their stated policies regarding local participation and even if so, whether they are actually being followed in practice once the money reaches the field.
• While recognizing that commercial logging ventures can in some instances be managed  by and help local communities, donors should usually avoid underwriting projects involving unsustainable commercial logging in inhabited but little disturbed forest areas.
• Through such experimental mechanisms as the Global Environment Facility and the Small Grants Program at the United Nations Development Programme, multilateral donors have already begun to demonstrate the effectiveness of financing smaller-scale development efforts.   Sponsors of these programs should seek opportunities to support sustainable, community based commercial forestry efforts.   Microcredit facilities, such as those now functioning well in many cities and towns, should be extended via the private sector to individuals, small user groups and local communities whose subsistence depends on harvesting forest resources and selling or trading them.
• Donors should make a maximum effort in the community forestry agreements they reach with governments to assure that their funds actually reach the community based and community supportive institutions for which they are intended.

Industry

During the 1990s, while aggregate levels of official development assistance have barely held steady, and dropped as a percentage of GNP in most donor countries, private capital flows have soared.   In the forest sector as elsewhere, the need for effective cooperation with private industry grows ever more acute.  To date, the record of interaction between forest communities and forest industries is mixed, ranging from thinly disguised exploitation (hiring local people to guard industrial teak plantations for a pittance) to far more positive situations where poor rural people win significant transfers of income.  In Brazil, Sweden, the U.S., and Mexico, mutually beneficial partnerships between corporations and communities or individuals owning and managing small forest tracts are at work.  These latter examples should become far more prevalent, and policy shifts can help.

Consumer and government incentives should reward private sector logging companies for adhering to independent third-party certification procedures as specified by the Forest Stewardship Council and other groups.   Codes of conduct should also govern the effects of their activities on the people and wildlife sharing their space.  Responsibly conducted, clear and transparent social and environmental impact assessments should precede logging activities in such regions.

In many countries where forest management systems were more often designed for subsistence or for environmental protection than for economic development, commercial community forestry is now more often seen as a desirable goal.   Private sector logging companies should seek opportunities to establish commercial partnerships with local community organizations, providing sustainable small scale community-based commercial logging efforts with technical, business, and marketing expertise in return for a share of economic returns.  Governments and international donors should foster such relationships, offering incentives to both sides.

Monitoring/Data Collection

Good information is an essential prerequisite to direct actions to in support of communitybased forest management.  In collecting data, it is important to achieve understanding both of bioregional conditions and of the sociopolitical situation.  One model for this sort of data collection is the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Program at Indiana University.  After extensive fieldtesting of its detailed, collaborative, and comprehensive research strategy, IFRI has established in-country research centers (CRCs) in Bolivia, Nepal, and Uganda.  Sustained long term funding is required to maintain these centers.  Similar new centers are required in other critical regions.   CIFOR in Bogor, Indonesia, the FAO's Forests, Trees, and People Program, the Environment and Policy Institute at the East-West Center in Honolulu, the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Overseas Development Institute in London are among other information collectors whose work requires additional support.

More field research is badly needed.  Academic researchers should particularly be funded to analyze the economic benefits of local forest management, to develop criteria and indicators for success in sustainable local forest management, and review the effects of international trade policies and distortions on forestdependent communities. Another important area of research is the assessment of the environmental or ecological trade-offs from community forestry as compared to "scientific" conservation approaches. Thirdly, anecdotal evidence shows that community forestry does guarantee more social and economic benefits to the local people, but more hard data is needed to strengthen the case.

Currently under development in the NGO community, under the leadership of the World Resources Institute, is the establishment of an independent "Forest Watch" entity that would monitor the overall state of forest policy and practice, especially the relationship between deforestation and sociopolitical developments at the national level in key forest nations, and issue periodic reports and advisories. Pilot Forest Watch projects are being launched in Gabon, Cameroon, Indonesia, and the province of British Columbia, Canada.  An important component within each of these new entities will be a "Community Forestry Watch" section to act as an ongoing research, networking, and reporting mechanism on progress and obstacles in the local forest management sector.

In situations where local forest communities receive national and international support, the community managers themselves should take the principal responsibility for evaluating their own performance, relative to that of the previous state managers, and collaborating with other communities to assess forest conditions at the regional level.

Communications

Too much knowledge, once acquired, remains confined within the discipline or institution where it originated.   Even within institutions, frequent staff and policy shifts render it difficult for outsiders to get a sense of what is or is not happening. At multilateral lending institutions, much of the most useful information is removed from internal documents before they are released to the public,

The waste is huge. The wheel gets reinvented, far too often, at a time when financial resources are scarce.  In this regard, it should be recognized that fortifying the system of research and training centers for forest management will have an important secondary effect: greater and much needed interaction and information sharing between donors, international NGOs, and international researchers.  These linkages will need reinforcement from institutions whose primary purpose is communications.

Among other desirable communications actions:

• International NGOs should try harder to use communications as a way to increase the reach and power of indigenous peoples' movements.
• The costs of computer technology and associated services decline, and more and more people learn how to use these facilities.  To an ever greater extent, access to the World Wide Web represents empowerment.  Donors should therefore equip local communities with appropriate computer and communications skills and hardware.
• Donors and other institutions should make greater and more transparent efforts to monitor, evaluate, and transmit to the public their experience with participatory forest management projects.  In so doing, they should make comprehensive efforts to translate and disseminate key materials about local forest management in local languages.  FAO should set as a high priority the establishment of this service in print and by radio.

Conclusion

In societies where forest production is closely related to corruption involving commercial, political, and military elites, local communities will face extreme difficulty in their efforts to regain control of forest lands. National efforts to strengthen local communities' role in forest management will, conversely,  usually come as part of broader programs to decentralize and democratize, to share benefits and income more equitably, manifest greater respect for customary laws and traditions, and show greater respect for human rights.   We emphasize, therefore,  that donors interested in community empowerment for forest management will be wise to concentrate their efforts in nations where there is already  evidence of a broader political will to attempt reforms in the direction of democracy and human rights. 

Where such conditions exist, beyond the specifics noted in previous sections of this paper, there will be opportunities for nations and international institutions to initiate useful changes in how people and groups relate to each other.  Public servants can be given incentives to share forest power rather than hoard it.  Civil society participation in gatherings that are now essentially governmental or diplomatic, especially those where decisions regarding local communities are to be made, would yield positive results.  New linkages between the world community and indigenous or forest-dependent people would also be useful; one possibility would be for the United Nations to launch a permanent forum where such people could present and discuss ideas and grievances.

There is no more cost-effective way to arrest the decline of the world's forests than to adopt the ideas and strategies outlined above.

7/26/98

**************************