Overview

In the complex world of international forestry, often what transpires in the field is barely reflective of what has been designed on paper. Whether site-specific donor-backed projects, national government attempts to reform institutional and sector policies, or local community-generated protection activities, even the best-intentioned efforts to achieve more sustainable and equitable management of the world's forests fail miserably to realize their goals. For the growing number of people concerned with forest protection, particularly in the tropics, a key factor to sustainable management is the full involvement of forest dwelling peoples and those living near forest areas in the planning and implementation of forest management schemes. Not surprisingly, perspectives abound on what actually constitutes "local participation" in forest management processes, running the gamut from sporadic "consultations" with local communities by donor agency staff to extensive engagement of local community ideas and activities throughout the life of a given project.

As part of SDI's attempt to conduct a "comparative analysis" of forest management policies designed by the chief international lending agencies - World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) - and forest management practices on the ground that depend on local community participation, I have examined institutional policies, countless project reports and evaluations, and spoken with agency staff and consultants to gain some insight into the links and gaps between policy and practice. While what has emerged is a disjointed, rather unclear picture of how donor policies concerning forest management and local community participation have translated into reality, some notable shifts in policy thinking and trends have appeared.

Generally, there is increasing language in some donor agency portfolios about the need to incorporate local communities and NGOs into forest and protected area management plans. The World Bank and USAID seem to have made the greatest strides in this area, with the ADB having recently formulated an official forest policy (3/95), and the IDB only just beginning to consider lending for environmental projects.

(In March 1997, the Sustainable Development Institute and sent e-mail 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 e-mail addresses of its Working Group on Community Involvement in Forest Management, a multi-stakeholder 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 have modified and sharpened the inventory of ideas we initially circulated.)

What follows is a new draft statement on community forestry's importance and needs. Before putting this document in final form, we once again invite your reactions.)

Communities and Forests: Strengthening the Field

Roger D. Stone and Claudia D'Andrea
July, 1998

Overview

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.

The Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), a non-governmental, non-profit organization funded through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has been studying the trends in policy among the major donor agencies, including the World Bank, that support the role of communities in managing forests and natural resources. SDI identified a number of the newer projects that have a major community forestry component and emphasize village level development. We selected the newer projects because they also should reflect the participatory policies introduced in recent years by donor agencies and we are interested to see how these policies are being implemented on the ground. SDI's main purpose is to improve the understanding of the pivotal role of local communities in sustaining environmental quality and economic development. Thus the participatory policy of these major donors is of particular interest to us.

I paid a ten day visit to India, in February 1996, to gain a sense of what is happening at the village level in the state of Madhya Pradesh where a statewide World Bank Project has adopted Joint Forest Management to combat increasing crisis of forest resource degradation.

National parks, wildlife reserves and other types of protected areas are a crucial means of conserving biological diversity. Local communities living within or adjacent to these areas have been excluded from the management plans in the past. The ensuing conflict of interest between the local people and the typically underfunded park management has caused people to question this traditional approach to conservation. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition that the management plans for protected area systems must include local people. This shift in approach has come from the discovery that the park management cannot work through policing by the park staff alone. Without attention to the underlying causes for continued exploitation of forest resources by local communities, the protected area systems will ultimately be diminished to a point of no return.

In tropical Southeast Asian protected areas, where the local communities are relying on the forests as a source of livelihood, removing access to the forest by setting park boundaries cannot succeed in eliminating forest exploitation without the creation of alternative income generation. Apart from the fact that the national park staff cannot police the hundreds of thousands of hectares of park, there is a need for regional and spatial planning in these areas where park systems have been set aside. Thus the concept of integrated conservation and development projects applies to the local and regional level, and attempts to find a balance between the needs for the conservation of biodiversity and economic development.

The Kerinci Seblat National Park is one of the largest reserves in Indonesia, spanning four provinces across the southern part of Sumatra. The area was identified in the 1980's as an important area for wildlife and biodiversity. Much of the area had been set aside from Dutch colonial times. In the past fifty years since independence, settlers have been pouring into the richly forested area from all over Sumatra and from Java. In the mid-1980's, the World Wide Fund for Nature together with the Indonesian government, set aside this area to become a national park. In 1988 WWF established an office worked with the provincial, regional and local government to develop park boundaries. In 1992, due to increasing encroachment, the boundaries were redrawn. By this time, the site had been proposed to become a World Bank and Global Environment Facility pilot project for the integrated conservation and development project concept.

In the state of Orissa, in Eastern India, village-based forest protection committees are taking matters of forest management and conservation into their own hands. This community forest protection in Orissa is fundamentally a decentralized grassroots movement initiated by small villages to protect local natural forests from further degradation. In many places in Orissa, communities, on their own accord, are forging unions or federations representing hundreds of villages to protect and regenerate forests, and even push for policy reforms. Orissa may have the most progressive forest policy of any Indian state; yet, inconsistencies in state forest policy and incentives for forest commercialization present obstacles for practical implementation of sound and equitable management. The vitality of these village-based movements demonstrates that implementation of sound forest management practices by forest communities is leading the policy transformation in this region; it is the forest department that needs to catch up with the local communities managing forests and not vice versa.

In a recent visit to the vast state of Orissa, Claudia D'Andrea, Program Associate of the Sustainable Development Institute investigated the rising phenomenon of the formation of unions or federations by visiting with four non-governmental organizations involved at various levels with some of the communities organizing themselves into very large federations. Ms. D'Andrea visited the grassroots organization People's Institute for Participatory Action Research (PIPAR) active in the Dhenkanal district of Orissa with the highest number of forest protection committees in the state; the Bhubaneshwar-based Regional Centre for Development Cooperation (RCDC) active in Western Orissa and the neighboring state of Eastern Madhya Pradesh; Vasundhara Institute, a forestry sector support organization active at both policy level and on the ground near to the state's capital; and OXFAM (India) Trust, which works all over the state but supports some activities of the Movement for Trees and Living Beings, known as BOJBP, one of the oldest and most conservation-oriented of the federation movements.

After the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, a special organizing committee was set up to establish an independent global commission addressing the problems of the deteriorating status of the world's forests. The idea for an independent commission developed out of a proposal from Ambassador Ola Ullsten of Sweden at the Global Forest Meeting held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1992. The goal of the Commission is to examine the use of the world's forests in the context of sustainable development. The WCFSD was launched by the InterAction Council of Former Heads of State in June 1995. A series of five regional Public Hearings are to be held around the world to identify the regional and international institutional, legal, and policy reforms that will lead to more equitable and sustainable forest management. The first of these five hearings was recently held in Jakarta, Indonesia for the Asia region. The next regional meeting will be held in Winnipeg, Canada, September 29 through October 5, 1996, and will address the problems of forests and sustainable development in North America and Mexico, the NAFTA region. Subsequent meetings will be held for the Latin American region, in Georgetown, Guyana in early December; the African region, either in the Congo Basin or the Dry Zone countries of Africa in early 1997; and in Russia for the European region in mid 1997. The following is a report by the Sustainable Development Institute which had the opportunity to attend the first Asia regional hearing and meeting.

The World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development (WCFSD) is an independent body of experts that was established after the Earth Summit of June 1992 to examine the problems of the deteriorating status of the world's forests. The Commission is holding five regional public hearings around the world to hear the views of different "stakeholder" groups on these issues. The Secretariat and the Commission will produce interim reports, and a final report will be issued in mid-1997.

The North American hearing was the second of the five regional hearings, following the model of the 1980's Brundtland Commission, planned by the WCFSD. The Sustainable Development Institute was invited to attend all meetings and speaking events along with the panel of experts. The Commission aimed to examine three areas: the sustainable use and management of forests; trade and export of forest-related products, and financial mechanisms and instruments needed for sustainable development.

The North America hearing focused on Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The abundance of Canadian stakeholders tended to dominate the hearing and detracted from the concerns over forests and sustainable development in Mexico and the U.S.. However, despite the smaller numbers of Mexicans and U.S. participants, an overwhelming message emerged that greater local and community-based control over forest resources may lead to wiser and more sustainable use and management of forests. Less decisive conclusions were reached on the other two areas of focus.

It was the intent of the Commissioners to have the participants address several questions in each panel that might indicate areas where international agreements might be strengthened, or recommendations might be formulated for the development of wiser use of diminishing global forest resources.

The WCFSD is concerned that progress is not being made in stopping forest loss and degradation due to a variety of realities on the ground that are frequently not discussed at international forest meetings. Thus the Commission has attempted to examine problems of forests and sustainable development not being addressed in the major global forest policy fora such as the UNCSD's IPF; Montreal, Helsinki, & Tarapoto Processes; the COP to the Convention on Biodiversity; and ITTO; At each of the regional hearings, the Commission has raised four basic questions:

• How much and what type of forest should be managed and protected?
• How should forests be managed and protected?
• By whom should they be managed and protected? and
• For whose benefits?

On behalf of the IUCN, I attended the 15th Commonwealth Forestry Conference in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe from 12-17 May 1997. My primary goal was to gain an understanding of the direction of the Commonwealth Forestry Conference. Additionally, it was an opportunity to broaden the membership of the working group on Community Involvement in Forest Management (WG-CIFM) and further the network of practitioners in the development of specific recommendations for community forestry policy. This community forestry policy project is being run through an electronic conference of the working group on CIFM and the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), a Washington-based NGO with a policy research project focusing on community forestry. The recommendations and results of this electronic conference will be directed to a number of international and independent bodies, including the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development (WCFSD).

Overview
Introduction
Recommended Actions

1. Property Rights and Legal Arrangements
2. Planning
3. Education and Training
4. Donor Policies
5. Representation
6. Industry
7. Monitoring/Data Collection
8. Communications

(In March 1997, the Sustainable Development Institute and sent e-mail 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 e-mail addresses of its Working Group on Community Involvement in Forest Management, a multi-stakeholder 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 have modified and sharpened the inventory of ideas we initially circulated.)

What follows is a new draft statement on community forestry's importance and needs. Before putting this document in final form, we once again invite your reactions.)

Introduction (back to contents)

The historical origins of state management of forest resources are found in the nineteenth century. 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 communities. Most nation states that emerged out of these colonial entities maintained this shift in management authority, away from those with a vested interest in sustaining forest resources for local use toward those benefitting from deforestation in ways ranging from long-term strategic planning to short-term commercial profiteering: 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.

Evidence mounts that this 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. Against this background, the importance of re-establishing 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 deforestation problems and move the world back toward forest stabilization and security.

Traditional forest dwellers and other forest-dependent rural people number perhaps one billion of the world's current population of 5.8 billion. When such people get a chance to manage or help manage their forests, both people and forest often benefit, as shown in examples from many nations with widely differing cultures and political systems. 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 many other lands, the principle of community participation in managing forests is taking hold in widely ranging forms. Corporate involvement with local communities varies from thinly disguised exploitation (hiring local people to guard industrial teak plantations for a pittance) to situations where, in return for honest labor, poor rural people win significant transfers of income. Arrangements between government and local communities now often involve more or less full fledged partnerships between villagers and representatives of the State. In Tasmania, village communities actually decide and control what happens in the forest.

Overall, there is no doubt that the idea of local participation has caught on in many lands over the past two decades. Many state forest authorities are recognizing that local communities can effectively manage forests. Community institutions or co-managers as well as small-scale farmers and woodland 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. 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. Protecting forests, the habitat for at least fifty percent of all forms of life on earth, protects the planet's biodiversity. Since trees also 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.

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. Even if they are, 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 only when they do not conflict with private commercial interests. 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, local officials and private concessioners often disregard them 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 the new policies 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, 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.

This is a time when, after a lapse that followed the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro, forests have returned to the international policy agenda. During 1997 close attention to forest policy is being paid by the United Nations' Commission on Sustainable Development and also by the independent World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development. The World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute have both initiated major new forests campaigns.

The World Forestry Congress, held only every six years, is scheduled for October 1997. Even though little ground was gained at the United Nations' "Rio Plus Five" gathering in New York in June 1997, the forests issue will not go away.

Hence this is a critical moment to promote new ideas about how to manage the world's forests better. Many groups seek remedies within the massive system of global trade in wood and wood products. But since 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 problem more completely and more directly. What follows is our menu of recommended actions to strengthen a concept whose implementation remains tiny in relation to its potential.

Recommended Actions (back to contents)

National efforts to strengthen local communities' role in forest management will 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. This paper recognizes the paramount importance of such major shifts in attitude and policy, and that donors will be wise to concentrate their efforts in nations where broad reforms of this sort are already in progress. Its more specific purpose is present a catalogue of readily implementable ideas, along with recommendations for people and institutions 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.

1. Property Rights and Legal Arrangements (back to contents)

Managing the world's forests sustainably will require nation states to delegate legal control over forest lands and other resources to forest dependent communities. What specifically should be done varies from country to country. Enacting a law 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 grant of state rights to local resource users is not already well advanced.

A. Legal rights recognized and/or granted to local communities should democratically legitimize local control, not facilitate the extension of the national government authority to the local level.

B. New arrangements empowering local communities should counter the prevailing legal assumption that private individual rights are the key to responsible use. But they will also 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.

C. User rights should apply not only to land, but to trees and other forest resources. While the expansion of protected areas to protect wildlife and preserve biodiversity merits encouragement, accommodating the needs of traditional human users of the forest--and enabling them to set and enforce the rules regulating usage--will often be key to overall success in sustaining forests.

D. Laws that encourage deforestation by declaring forested lands to be "idle," empty, or territorium nullius, and therefore subject to tax or tenurial inequities, should be repealed..

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

E. 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.

F. 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 especially support the development of public interest environmental law institutions that focus on the problems, potentials and aspirations of rural resource users, including forest-dependent communities.

G. Creating room for experimentation with more decentralized forest tenure and management systems by reducing the risks to civil servants of relinquishing control.

2. Planning (back to contents)

A. 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 empower 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.

B. Planning for forests and agriculture needs careful coordination. In lands as disparate as the United States and Indonesia, forest agencies get buried within agriculture departments. They suffer from underfunding and lack of visibility as well as from orientation toward the wrong objectives. Independence and greater visibility for forest agencies would in many instances bring better balance to the equation, and more forest-sensitive policies and strategies.

C. A similar imbalance requires correction 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.

D. 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.

3. Education and Training (back to contents)

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 can often provide fora to bridge the gaps between NGO's, government officials, and communities. This is all 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 these and other forms of capacity-building for communities and specifically designed for them. We especially note these needs:

A. 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.

B. 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.

C. Donors should also magnify their support for NGO-directed efforts to improve the skills of leaders within forest-dwelling communities.

D. NGOs need to strengthen their own ability to act as bridges between forest communities, national governments, and international agencies. 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 skills. 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.

4. Donor Policies (back to contents)

Until the 1990s, international aid donors and lenders channeled their funds through national and state governments and allocated almost all 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. But in the forest sector, policy modifications have shifted the emphasis sharply in recent years and reduced the extent of environmental damage imposed on 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:

A. 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.

B. 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.

C. Donors should be less involved in micro-planning 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.

D. Since it will often take a long time for good plans to be developed through participatory and transparent processes, donors are well advised not to rush in prematurely.

E. 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. Since conditionalities sometimes backfire, however, aid agencies should more often apply the notion of selectivity. In this approach, the donor clearly establishes the ground rules for support. It works only with those countries that agree and have already manifested their commitment to common goals.

F. 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.

G. 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.

H. Through such experimental mechanisms as the Global Environment Facility and the Small Grants Program at the United Nations Development Programme, multilateral donors should seek opportunities to support sustainable, community-based commercial forestry efforts.

J. Micro-credit 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.

K. 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.

L. In many nations, the pressures to increase exports imposed by structural adjustment agreements often hasten forest decline in nations with weak natural resource policies and institutions. Before demanding 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.

5. Representation (back to contents)

A. The international community should accelerate its efforts to promote civil society participation in gatherings that are now essentially governmental or diplomatic, especially those where decisions regarding local communities are to be made.

B. The United Nations should consider establishing a Permanent Forum on indigenous and forest-dependent people under the General Assembly or ECOSOC.

6. Industry (back to contents)

A. Consumer and government incentives should reward private sector logging companies for developing and adhering to codes of conduct. In addition to binding them to certification measures set forth by the Forest Stewardship Council and other groups, these codes 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.

B. In countries such as Mexico and Papua New Guinea where conditions favor the development of commercial community forestry, private sector logging companies should seek opportunities to establish partnerships with local community organizations. Forest cooperatives should seek technical, business, and marketing relationships. Incentives should be offered on both sides. Forested countries should all be encouraged to supportive sustainable small-scale community-based commercial logging efforts.

7. Monitoring/Data Collection (back to contents)

A. Good information is an essential prerequisite to direct actions to in support of community-based forest management. In collecting data, it is important to achieve understanding both of bio-regional conditions and of the socio-political situation. One model for this sort of data collection is the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Program at Indiana University. After extensive field-testing 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.

B. Currently under discussion in the NGO community 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 socio-political developments at the national level in key forest nations, and issue periodic reports and advisories. An important component of this new institution should 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. If the broader Forest Watch organization fails to take shape, NGO leaders should establish Community Forestry Watch independently as a free-standing organization.

C. 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 and collaborating with other communities to assess forest conditions at the regional level.

D. Donors should make greater and more transparent efforts to monitor, evaluate, and transmit to the public their experience with participatory forest management projects. Frequent staff and policy shifts at multilateral lending institutions, plus the fact that much of the most useful information is removed from internal documents before they are released to the public, render it difficult for outsiders to get a sense of what is or is not happening.

E. Support for 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 forest-dependent communities.

8. Communications (back to contents)

A. International NGOs should try harder to use communications as a way to increase the reach and power of indigenous peoples' movements.

B. 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.

C. Too much knowledge, once acquired, remains confined within the discipline or institution where it originated. 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.

D. Donors and other institutions 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 which should include radio and well as written transmissions.