Overview

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.

It is estimated that Orissa some 10,000 forest protection committees (FPC's) that have formed spontaneously at the village level in response to experiences of fuelwood limited regarding the precise numbers and distribution. Most of India's FPC's are found in the central tribal belt where forest areas, poverty, and tribal populations dominate. The core area of community forest protection reaches from south Bihar through West Bengal, Orissa and northern Andra Pradesh where village-based groups are involved in forest protection. Recent surveys indicate that groups in Madhya Pradesh, Rajastan, and Gujurat are growing in numbers estimated to be around 600.

Orissa is one of the most important forest states in India. Forest cover in Orissa has been rapidly decreasing in recent decades. From 1981 to 1989, Orissa saw a decline in forest cover of 22 percent. (Poffenberger, 1996) Commercial exploitation and a growing rural population in the past thirty years have accelerated forest degradation. This exploitation has come in waves in different places in the state. From 1962-68, the forest department issued contracts for concessions in the publid 600.

Orissa is one of the most important forest states in India. Forest cover in Orissa has been rapidly decreasing in recent decades. From 1981 to 1989, Orissa saw a decline in forest cover of 22 percent. (Poffenberger, 1996) Commercial exploitation and a growing rural population in the past thirty years have accelerated forest degradation. This exploitation has come in waves in different places in the state. From 1962-68, the forest department issued contracts for concessions in the public forest and a period of intense degradation followed. From 1968-72, community efforts were made to restore and protect the forests. From 1972-78, there was another period of degradation associated with commercial exploitation. By 1980, many village-based groups had emerged to protect adjacent forest resources and in some places take over the protection of some reserve forest. In 1988, the state passed a resolution recognizing the role of these communities and giving them responsibilities to guard against theft and fire prevention in return for collection of fuelwood and other minor forest products. In 1992, the state passed a second resolution and registered some 6,085 FPCs. (Poffenberger, 1996) Meanwhile, hundreds more groups were functioning as FPCs that were not registered.

There are four types of forest in Orissa: Reserve forest (48%); Demarcated protected forest (29%); Undemarcated protected forest (23%) also known as Khesra; and degraded forest. Until recently, strict laws forbade communities from entering reserve and protected forests but encouraged communities to adopt and protect Khesra forest. In 1995, due to the poor condition of the state's reserve forests, the Orissa forest department stopped issueing permits for commercial felling. This moratorium on felling has allowed communities to begin to protect and manage some of the protected forest in return for collection of some minor forest products.

Key factors for the success of community forest protection in Orissa include presence of strong village institutions; the ambiguous status of protected forests; and the regenerative capacity of the natural forests. Many of the tribal communities dependent on the forests have been key to initiating forest protection. In Orissa, strong informal village organizations, formed below the village level government administration, have helped effective forest protection efforts to emerge. Traditional village groups have remained viable organizing entities in Orissa partly because of the low number of local level government officials, which minimizes interference in customary village organization. While caste remains a factor skewing the distribution of resources among those protecting and using forest goods and services, the informal organization by socially cohesive user group (usually corresponding to homogenous caste sub-groups) has minimized conflict that is often pronounced in government organized FPC's. Conflicts persist within and among villages in Orissa, and NGOs and the FD have played important mediating roles, both among castes and between villages.

The following is a description of what is taking place in Orissa, with some brief historical context for orientation. The first site visit was to an area where the NGO PIPAR has been actively involved. PIPAR has been providing a range of skills training, technical and legal/policy support to villages in Dhenkanal over the past few decades. Today, PIPAR has some 45 trained village-based organizers, and has been working in 1,000 villages across the district. With a Ghandian philosophy and a firm belief in empowerment of the poorest of the poor, PIPAR promotes mediation for solution to forest conflicts. PIPAR is well known among villages in Dhenkanal and is highly regarded by the Forest Department and among NGOs across India. Samarendra Satapathy, field coordinator for PIPAR took me to see some of the interesting areas in Dhenkanal.

The Village of Vejibolua in Rupabalia, Dhenkanal (back to contents)

The Rupabalia forest originally belonged to the Raja of Dhenkanal who had forest guards living in Nathua and Vejibolua villages. Sankharsana Hota, founder and Director of PIPAR recounted a brief historical background of the area before explaining the philosophy of the group and what they have struggled to achieve. In 1933 the forest was demarcated and designated for commercial utilization. By the end of World War II, commercial timber operations were harvesting Sal (Shorea Robusta) on a rotational basis which proved to be unsustainable. But the regenerative capacity meant that the forests did eventually grow back. By the 1960's, the forest department were giving contracts for commercial operations. By the 1970's villagers were experiencing growing scarcities of timber and non-timber forest products. Forest protection iniatives began to emerge. In 1972, a forest protection committee was formed in the village of Vejibolua, a hamlet of Mahapada. This FPC was one of the first in the area. By the 1980's many more groups had formed spontaneously at the local level to deal with resource scarcity. The forest protection committee is formed of a general body with representation from the head of each household, and an executive body of four members overseeing forest management operations and five office bearers with decisionmaking and financial authority. All executive body members serve for one year. Naturally, this committee excludes women's representation altogether. The primary motivation for forming the protection committee was economic.

The committee in Vejibolua has never received formal recognition from the forest department but has been effectively protecting the natural regeneration of the forest. Recently the group has been attempting to register itself with the Orissa Forest Department (OFD) without success. The area is visited infrequently by the OFD and the villagers have been reluctant to allow the FD into the forest they have been protecting. The villagers are not altogether sure that what they are protecting will remain under their control if they do register it, but they have seen conflict in neighboring villages result in the takeover by the OFD of forest which had been protected for decades by communities because the forest protection committee of one village had no recognized claims over another village.

In May 1996, a conflict between two villages over a hill that one village had been protecting and a second village that had an agreement with the first village to remove a set amount of trees for ceremonial purposes. The first village caught the second village violating their agreement. The two villages took up arms, and there was a free-for-all collection of forest products from both sides. The OFD came in and declared the hillock officially under its protection. The result is a barren hill that neither village nor the FD is protecting. If the FD had mediated early on rather than simply taking over the hill, the forest might have been saved. Part of the reason it did not was that the village had never registered its committee with the FD.

Local FPCs and Joint Forest Management (back to contents)

Vejibolua is part of a the Chandipada forest block. PIPAR recounted that the villagers had begun to spontaneously organize on a block level which includes approximately 150 villages, or 24 Panchayats (village administrative units) with each Panchayat representing about 10,000 people. PIPAR had organized meetings previously for various reasons, to discuss problems at the block level and to inform them of recent policy changes at the state and national level.. PIPAR translated the legislation into the local language and explained it. PIPAR encouraged the village protection committees to consider how they could manage conflicts over their forest resources. In September 1996, several months prior to this site visit, the villagers began to organize meetings by themselves and invited both PIPAR and the OFD. PIPAR reported that at the first meeting there were 115 villages represented by at least one person. The villagers called the meeting to discuss problems of boundary dispute, conflicts over resources, illegal collection of logs and other non-wood forest products, as well as market access, and they discussed the matter of JFM registration. The main motivation for registration is the perceived need to be able to prosecute illegal collectors. At a second meeting 70 villages were represented with five from each village so approximately 350 people met to discuss these matters. The villagers want legal recognition of their forest rights.

The villagers are skeptical of JFM. They wantownership over the forests they manage.The people say that FD itself complains that the forest is too large and that there are too many villages and forests to supervisel. Yet, the FD tells them that the new JFM policy will allow the villagers to have fifty percent of the forest products. The villagers, some of whom have been protecting the forests for thiry years are not impressed by this offer; they see it as a way for the forest department to take fifty percent of the forest that the villagers have been protecting. They are in a bind, if they register as JFM committees the OFD may then come in and remove forest products. But with the status quo, the OFD rarely attempts to resolve conflicts by siding with the forest protection committees. The villagers have no legal rights over the forest or the forest products they protect.

A group of the villagers from Vejibolua gathered at midday under a tree. Ordinarily they would be busy harvesting their fields, but the drought wiped out fifty percent of the harvest, and of that only fifty percent was adequate, so they have mostly finished collecting the 25% of their harvest that survived. Govindo in bright pink came running up late saying, "I was in the fields and came home for tea when I heard someone was here!" I asked him to describe what it was like in this area when he was a young man. He said, "In the fifties the forest was quite dense. There were tigers, peacocks, and deer. From 1955-60, the forest was massively degraded by logging and people took the rest. It took three years to degrade the hillsides here." He exlpained that during the sixties there was severe shortage of fuelwood, "It took three days to collect a cartload of fuelwood, walking 24 kilometers." They described how the FD used to harrass them and fine them for taking logs from other places. Finally they got motivated to protect the forest. Things broke down in the seventies, but, PIPAR came along and motivated them again in 1980. By this time the OFD came in with its Social Forestry program.

The village rejected the OFD and refused to allow them to clear their forest to plant fast growing species of trees, "The FD wanted to clear areas we protected. We sent them packing." PIPAR explained that later on, the government decided that there could not be plantations in demarcated protected forest areas, so the program was stopped. When asked why they were organizing on a block level, they excitedly answered, "We have many problems. We need the FD to cooperate with us. They won't register us. But we need our forest demarcated. Only the FD has the legal authority to do that. We will do it ourselves but we need to be legally protected from marauders.The FD wants the village government to be the same as the FPC leader. That won't work either. We want them to recognize that our FPCs our working. We want legal recognition of our village forests. And then we want to fight for the ability to market minor forest products that the state forest development cooperation monopolizes." answered Saktrugana Buhana

Fourteen percent of the population of Dhenkanal is tribal comprised of Juang, Munda, Saora, and Santhal. PIPAR works with a wide range of groups in Dhenkanal. Inevitably, on the outskirts of each village lies a sahi (village sub-group) of tribals. They are more dependent on the forest than other villagers, because they often have no land. They tend to organize among themselves to protect and collect forest products.

Ranpur Range, Nayagarh District (back to contents)

Not far from the capital city of Orissa, Bhubaneshwar, the forest protection committees in the Ranpur Range have also begun to organize on a block level. Some of the FPCs in the area have been protecting their forests since 1955, other FPCs have formed more recently 10-15 years ago. The community-based organizations came into contact with Giri Rao, field organizer from the Vasundhara Institute in 1994. The villages protecting forest along the range wanted to form a federation to strengthen their rights over the forest they were protecting. According to Prateep Nayak also of Vasundhara Institute, this federation is the first in the state to formally demand tenurial rights over their community forests. They want to have legal recognition from the Orissa Forest Department so that they could prosecute illegal cutters, and they wanted to organize to strengthen their capacity to market the non-wood forest products in the area. Vasundhara Institute has representation on the Orissa state JFM Steering Committee, and is active on a number of levels in attempting to strengthen the rights of communities over forestlands they manage. Neera Singh, Coordinator of Vasundhara sees these federations as an emerging trend that may precipitate many of the changes that need to take place in to strengthen local control over forests and forest resources. They would like to see representatives of the federations sit on the Orissa JFM Steering Committee to voice the concerns of the local communities and really create some policy changes that will revolutionize the way the Forest Department operates.

Before independence the area was part of the Nayagarh princely state. Forest management was carried out by traditional practice. Some of the reserve forest was brought under forest department management in the thirties, but the area was basically undisturbed by commercial logging interests until the 1950's. By the late 1960's the area was completely denuded. Vasundhara's community organizer Giri took me to two villages along the Ranpur range. The first had been protecting its forest for twenty years. The second for fifty-five years. Their experiences are very telling of the external factors communities face in protecting their forests.

Samar Singapur is located a good distance from the main road, and the village is nestled at the foot of the hill where their village forest begins, so that they can keep watch over who passes down the main path. A tribal sahi is located a few hundred meters closer to the forest. It was late afternoon when I got to the village, most of the families where there and we gathered on the porch of the temple to discuss the histoy of forest protection in their village. They told me the answers to the basic questions about how many members are active in the committee, how they organize, what the benefits are, what they think about the forest department. But they soon grew bored of these questions telling me, "Why don't we go to see the forest and walk through it. Then you will be able to ask us better questions."

I complied and we set off en masse toward the hills. They were right of course. Every few feet they would stop and show me another fruit or medicinal root, or tree that they use for different purposes. They told me tales of how the forest guards watch from their grass huts. Most recently, they complained to the forest department about the pythons and told them that they would refuse to protect the forest if the OFD wouldn't pay for a new forest guard hut with a real roof and walls that were snake proof.

Adjacent to the forest they protect is an old rubber plantation that juts into a small valley before that we passed before reaching the larger trees in the forest. The forest was fairly dense and cool with trees that stretched over our heads and had a girth too large to wrap yourself around. These trees are mostly Sal (Shorea Robusta), which is quite valuable. Strict rules prevent the villagers from cutting anything without approval from the committee for a certain quantity for a specified use. No axe is allowed into the forest. Only bamboo is cut generally for practical or ceremonial needs. Unless a house burns down, basically no trees are cut. The women guard during the day as they collect the dead wood and leaves on the ground or the fruits and other products they need. The men guard at night taking turns going in a set order so that everyone in the village knows who is responsible for guarding on any given night. A bamboo staff is planted in front of the guard's house in the morning by the guard from the night before. This is a system they developed themselves.

No one in the 63 household village (about 500 people) has violated the rules. When someone from a neighboring village is caught red-handed violating their forests, the villagers will confiscate the goods and then invite the individual to confront the village as a whole to apologize several days later. A fine will be determined together with the village. This works fairly well for small-scale violations providing an element of social pressure and financial penalty to prevent theft.

Of course the women are not part of the traditional village council, nor the forest protcetion committee. While Vasundhara Institute would like to see that change, the cultural obstabcles to such a change are too great. Vasundhara is there to facilitate the existing systems' needs for legal village rights over the forest and forest products they protect. In the future, there may be some room for change. When I had finished my walk though the forest, one of the village elders turned to me and said, "Now you have met with the men of the village and heard our stories. What about the women?" I was delighted. They indicated for me to go to the group of women and talk with them. They brought me inside one home and gave me a tour of the house with its clean mud walls and floors. It had an open courtyard and in the middle a cow munching green fodder and some chickens fluttering about. Each of the small rooms housed a different of the inlaws and their children. The hearth was in one rooms where the blackened pots rested at the corners of the room. A back door led to a bountiful but compact little garden with all the spices and many fresh vegetables growing for her family. I was pleased for the invitation to see the house and apologized profusely that I did not have time to sit with them and hear their stories.

We drove as the sun began to set. In Bajarkot, I met with some of the oldest villagers who had started the forest protection efforts in 1955. I asked them what had motivated them to start protecting the forest. They said it was a variety of factors including the scarcity of fuelwood and of other forest products, increasing microclimate temperatures, but mostly the lack of water for irrigation which was leading to severe undernutrition in the area. The water had a special story too. Before they would finish the story, they wanted to take me to the edge of the forest they had been protecting for the past fifty years. They nimbly clambered over the rocks and led me to a stream with a small waterfall trickling down through a crevice of rocks from the forest above. There were offerings of flowers and incense on the rocks. They told me that this is the place where the water goddess of the area lives. If her temple dries up, there will be severe drought. Because of the forests in the hills above, she has kept the rains at bay in the monsoon and has saved some water for them even in the catastrophic drought of this year. While villages nearby had lost 75% of their harvest, the farmers in Bajarkot had only lost 25% because of the water. They understand perfectly the relationship between protecting the watershed and having water for their fields, but the other element, the wrath of the goddess guarantees that no one cuts any trees in the forest.

It was dark by then, but without even entering the forest, it was clear that the giant trees were well-protected. This forest is along a main road. Protecting the forest near a road can be a dangerous business when there are threats of armed gangs driving up with trucks and truckloads of women "headloaders" who carry the wood out of the forest on their heads to earn a wage while the truckowners drive off with thousands of dollars in timber, not to mention, decades worth of forest protection. The villagers are firmly committed to protection and guarding against this kind of threat. In a nearby village, they recounted that the village forest guards actually caught one of these armed truckloads and the whole village held it captive until someone could come from the Forest Department and prosecute the offenders. But, often, even the most honest of the FD officials let some of this activity go on; one very committed District Forest Officer based in Cuttack admitted that he is compelled to accept a certain number of bribes from the wood mafias lest he find his own life threatened. There is a certain level of corruption that will remain a fact of life. Some villagers in the area have begun tostop planting commercially valuable species of timber and try to protect only the things they need for their subsistence to avoid the threat of these headloaders.

The bigger concern of these villagers is protecting against neighboring villagers that are coming into the forest to collect things on a regular basis. This is another reason why the villagers are trying to organize on a block level. One elderly but energetic man named Arjunrout has been running between the villages and singlehandedly convincing them to think about this idea of bringing together the villages that are already protecting and finding ways that they can organize on a block level; meanwhile, the villages that are already protecting can try to get the other villages to begin to protect their forests. His vision includes an eye to marketing the non-timber forest products from the block in an organized fashion with a little credit and some instruction on how to manage things they could be a lot more profitable and have a well-protected forest.

Arjunrout is key to Vasundhara's involvement. For a long time, with villagers by nature suspicious of anyone from another village coming around, no one trusted Arjunrout. They thought he was up to no good. But his years of trying to convince people to organize have prepared the ground for Vasundhara which is working in only a few of the villages in the range so far. Vasundhara likewise has had a hard time explaining that they are only interested in strengthening the voice of the villagers in policymaking and increasing forest ownership or forest rights and market access for the villagers. The villagers are used to NGOs giving them projects, and may not really see the diffeence between NGO and government projects in many places. The villagers in this area are primarily motivated by the economic incentives that clearer ownership would give them, but also the ability to minimize conflicts and the threat of illegal cutters from outside the area. Clearly they recognize some of the other benefits to protection. Slowly they have begun to value the organizer from Vasundhara, realizing that Vasundhara is actually helping to explain what they can accomplish by organizing but mainly for explaining what sort of options they have. There has been a stream of new programs and new forest policy, especially in recent years. The villagers look at these changes with skepticism. They have seen the failure of the social forestry program, and they look at the JFM with more skepticism with the OFD coming to them to tell them the villagers can now keep fifty percent of the forest for themselves. The villagers in Bajarkot will not let the OFD into the forest for fear they will take it back. So, the villagers need their rights over the forest clarified, but they need clear legal protection against the threat of the FD taking it away from them.

BOJBP - Oxfam India Trust (back to contents)

In the Binjgiri range in the District of Puri is an area that has been organizing on a completely different platform from any other in Orissa, through environmental campaigns in the schools. I met with Sarthak Pal, Forest Support Officer of Oxfam India Trust who told me about the work they are doing in Orissa and particularly about the BOJBP environmental movement in Binjgiri. In the early seventies, noting the denuded hills a professor at the Utkal University began writing letters to his colleagues. A bright headmaster of a middle school, Mr. Joginath Sahu, started an environmental campaign through the schools. His village of Kesharpur took a decision to protect a small patch on the hillside in 1976. The regeneration of the patch attracted pilferers from nearby villages, and it became clear that they needed to involve the other villages. Through the environmental awareness campaign, the need to protect the hill began to spread. In 1982, a workshop was organized that brought together the representatives from 22 villages. The representatives formed the Brikshya O'Jeevar Bandhu Parishad (BOJBP) or "Friends of Trees and Living Beings" a voluntary organization with an open membership to formalise the efforts of forest protection and environmental conservation. The members are mostly small, marginal farmers and landless laborers, with a small number of "scheduled castes" in several villages but no tribal populations.

The organization began to reach out to protect forests that were not immediately adjacent to their villages. They used popular means like street theater to educate the other villages about the need to protect forests. Now it is working in 450 villages through its 13 sister organizations. Approximately 20,000 hectares of forest are being managed as common pool resources in these 450 villages. Based in Gandhian Philosophy, the organization has been catalytic to forest protection in the area without financial penalties, or requiring intervention from the OFD. The organization employs social methods to punish offenders by embarrassment and public ridicule, and discourages fines or coercion. For inter-village problems the village council gathers the elders in the village to fall at the feet of the offender which is tremendously embarrassing in the Hindu/Oriya (Orissa) culture. The BOJBP mediates intravillage conflicts that arise through local arbitration and Gandhian approaches. They also use Gandhian tools of fasting and prayer to avert threats to the forest and local environment. All 22 villages have traditional informal village councils that have been managing a number of other village resources. These are organized roughly along the same lines as other village forest protection committees.

The structure of a federation already exists among the 450 villages which are organized into 20 clusters. The BOJBP is organizing at the federation level for three main reasons:

1. JFM allows the FD to allocate forest patches to villages with a string of incentives attached. The result is that the villagers are protecting against eachother rather than for eachother against outsiders. The JFM concept changes the focus from protection of the forest to protection of the village resources only. The federation concept will prevent the FD from independently intervening in a given area.
2. Inter-area resource transfer is not allowed by the JFM rules. This makes eliminating mafia gangs problematic.
3. Villages feel that JFM is an extension of social forestry into natural forested areas and see their resource threatened by the imminent takeover of the products of the forest by the forest department officials.

Oxfam funds the BOJBP on a very small scale. In 1986 they started out giving the BOJBP Rs16,000 (USD$500) to support the awareness campaigns. Since 1988, Oxfam has supported an indigenous seed bank on roughly the same levels. And Oxfam gives some small amounts to fund environmental education programs through the schools. Oxfam has also been supporting the formation of women's savings and credit organizations, in relation to the NTFPs in particular. Generally the lowest caste women are involved in these groups. The low status of women in the area, and the state of Orissa which has the highest number of dowry deaths in India, remains entrenched. Oxfam is supporting a huge number of efforts across Orissa at very small levels. They have a long term commitment to facilitating the process of social change. Oxfam is also documenting CFM in Western Orissa and near Tangi (Nayagarh) and tracing the trends of the institutional changes.

Balingir - The Regional Center for Development Cooperation (back to contents)

In Western Orissa near the border of Madhya Pradesh, the Regional Center for Development Cooperation (RCDC) has been facilitating the development of another federation which has emerged quite rapidly in the past few years. It is already a strong federation whereas the other groups in Orissa are in various states of development. The area called Balangir has about 400 villages. Some of the villages have quite different histories of protection. In one region a woman in her 40's has been protecting a 25-acre forest area by herself for the past seven years. A man of 55 was protecting a patch of 1,800 acres for 8-10 years, fighting off pilferers from 20 villages in sometimes violent conflicts. He finally prompted the formation of a forest protection committee in his village that he could share the protection responsibility. This patch is said to look much denser than a ten year patch should look.

Balangir was targetted early on for heavy timber commercialization in the 1950's. The impact was already felt in the 1960's with fuelwood crises and severe drought every two to three years. The land was marked by soil erosion and the rivers with siltation. Some plantation efforts were initiated by the Forest Department in the 1970's that ultimately failed in the north and was followed by a huge conversion to agriculture. A few good people in the forest department, concerned about the disparity in the south brought some relief to the communities. The area was a big target for Social Forestry Programs - community plantations - in the 1980's. The Social Forestry programs brought a lot of energy and optimism at first. School teachers, social workers, and NGOs got involved. The Forest Department planned to hand the forests over to the communities after three years. The involvement of the communities and the promise of cash returns motivated the villagers to protect the forests. But the selection of quick growing eucalyptus and acacia sapped the already low ground water aquifers and the regeneratio capacity of these trees is very low, Furthermore, these varieties did nothing to take the pressure off the forest.

In 1991, Neera Singh, who later went on to found Vasundhara, came to assess the impact of social forestry for Swedish ODA (SIDA) and found that there were a variety of interesting initiatives that had nothing to do with the original intentions of the Social Forestry program. In 1993, RCDC formed through a coalition of people working at different NGOs which continued to document the events unfolding in the area of Balangir. In 1994, RCDC held a series of meetings bringing 10-15 villages together at a time to discuss the protection of a single forest.Convening these meetings brought a number of issues, particularly the desire of the villagers to clarify the legal status. RCDC found that the villagers had little or no knowledge of the JFM policies. RCDC discussed the legal status of forests and forest policy; and they discussed protection and sustainable management of forests.

The communities expressed concerns over the conflicts over timber and the marketing of some of the non-wood forest products that have very high value. In fact the value of these products is so good, that the state has nationalized - or made into state property - Mahua, which has tremendous medicinal and nutritional value; Sal seeds for reforestation; Tendu leaves, also called Kendu leaves from the region of Balangir are the best in the country used for rolling bidis, a kind of cigarette that has a high market value. 40% of the nation's tendu leaves come from Orissa; and Bamboo which is a basic staple multipurpose product used by villagers for construction, firewood, fodder. It is used by artisans. Bamboo is also a major raw material for pulp and paper production..

The Orissa State Development Corporation (OFDC), essentially the state forest department enterprise arm, handles the marketing of all these products. The villagers are not allowed to sell any of these products themselves, nor are they allowed to collect them in an amount larger than what they can use themselves in a day or two. Because the Forest Department forbids the sale of these products they essentially monopolize the market and the profits from tendu leaves alone number in the hundreds of millions. According to the Revenues Reports of the OFDC the revenue distribution is changing dramatically. Timber revenues have dropped from 166 million Rupees in 1991 to 80 million Rupees in 1996 while revenues from tendu leaves have risen from 768.5 million Rupees to 800 million Rupees. That means tendu brings ten times the revenue of timber. Add to that the fact that, according to Manoj Pattanaik, Coordinator of RCDC, 80% of the NTFPs are illegally transported in Orissa by outsider private traders. If the government let the local communities into the marketing of these products, RCDC argues that even if the communities were given only a small increase in profits, it would be an incentive that would help them control against the illegal harvesting of these nationlized products and bring more profit to the OFDC. RCDC sees that the communities do not want to nor do they need to own the resources they protect, but need recognition from the forest department of rights over managment and marketing the forest products they protect. Without these sorts of rights, the problems of illegal trade and corruption as well as of forest degradation by outsiders, will never end and the local communities will remain dirt poor subsistence farmers.

In 1994, RCDC brought together about 80 people representing 10 forest blocks. In June 1995 a forum was created recognized by the people in a large rally. The Forest Department was informed that the communities had organized their protection on a forum (or federation) level. In 1996, they began to take up issues with the OFD and matters of inter-village and intra-village conflicts in the region, as mediators. RCDC maintains a good relationship with the FD but feels the officers do not appreciate the work they are doing. RCDC has a network of journalists, politicians, lawyers, and others involved in exposing village level problems, particularly institutionalized corruption within the forest department.

The Balangir forum working with RCDC is strategizing now to determine what policy directions it might shape. Ultimately, Manoj Pattanaik said, "The Forest Department has to change from being a landlord to being a service organization and support rather than undermine the efforts of villagers interested in protecting the forests. Communities can manage forests sustainably. They just need the FD to believe in them."

Conclusions (back to contents)

Although I did not get to see all the villages involved in the grass movements going on in Orissa, between the field visits I did make and the conversations I had, I think I gained a remarkable picture of what is unfolding in Orissa. A comparative analysis shows that each case is very different. In Puri district, where resource scarcity is high, the user groups are highly organized with the Gandhian and environmentalist BOJBP movement.The BOJBP has been able to use the school system and rely on traditional social customs for sanctions rather than fines. Modest support from Oxfam India Trust has primarily strengthened the environmental awareness campaigns. In Dhenkanal, moderate resource scarcity and the lack of a strong grassroots village organization across the range has provided scattered pockets of strong village forest protection. PIPAR's role here has been instrumental as an outside mediator for intervillage conflict and between the FD and villages. PIPAR has also been instrumental in translating and explaining the forest policy developments in Orissa which has been catalytic to the development of the neophyte federation. In Ranpur, Vasundhara has played a similar role in explaining policy to the villagers and raising their concerns at the state level through the JFM steering committee and through other means to influence policy. They are concerned with seeing genuine representation of these people's organizations at the state level. Balangir's federation has formed with the catalytic role of RCDC and its network. The Balangir federation may be the first in Orissa to raise some serious policy level concerns. All four of the NGOs are working together to coordinate and inform eachother of events unfolding.

While the districts are marked by differences in physical attributes, local community action to protect forests stands out in all cases. The spread of community management of forests has led the government of Orissa to pass a series of resolutions that recognize the need to involve local populations in forest protection and certain "usufructs" and "concessions" in exchange for forest management by protection committees. The government resolution of 1990 called for the FD to establish protection committees. About 6,000 FPCs were formed in haste by the forest department by 1991. Some of these FPCs are functioning quite well but most of them seem to be inoperative. In some cases, the area being traditionally protected by village was allotted to some other village for protection. This partly due to the FD's planning of these committees on paper, rather than in the field, this also explains how so many were formed in one year. Neera Singh told me this is a good example of how well intentioned policy decisions are liable to lead to unforeseen and undesirable results, if not implemented properly.

This raises a number of questions that should be considered in developing future strategies. This is a list taken from a report authored by Neera Singh, Kundan Singh, and Shashi Kant (IIFM, Swedforest, and SIDA)

Is management of forest resources by communities desirable? Should develoutions of power from the State to the Local Communities to manage forests be taken up? If so, to what extent and in what form?

• Do the alternatives for best management depend on the local situation? What if the situation changes?
• What if informal management movements develop into fiercely independent bodies hostile to the suggestion of joint managmeent in future, and assert that caretakers of the forests are the rightful owners?
• What if government attempts to reassert its ownership rights result in widespread destruction of forests? What kind of flexible management systems can be evolved?

Orissa is far ahead of other states at the grassroots protection level, and far behind in development of supportive policy. Many of the solutions found for Orissa's forest protection will be applicable in other areas in India, and other countries and geographic regions, but many may not. It is important to look at the developments in Orissa for the structural, social, and political changes that are taking place. Policies like JFM which in principle are useful starting points for the development of partnerships, cannot be applied without extensive community organizing, community training, and forest department reorientation and training. Particularly the latter is urgent according to my conversations with NGOs in Orissa. The traiing must be comprehensive and central to the process. Neera and Kundan Singh suggest that the process should be downward (throught the ranks) and outward (through the staff functions). They raise David Korten's approach to organizational change as a three phase process which in the first phase embraces action research, involvement of local people, and linking of learnings to actions. In the second phase, the organization learns to integrate new methods and procedures. And only in phase three can expansion begin. The process cannot go any faster than the agency can transform itself. Meanwhile, communities need to have an environmental stake in the forest as much as an economic one. It is important to remember that all of these developments are new and rapidly evolving. There are no models that can be applied.

"Forest communities possess a wealth of knowledge regarding their environment and how to sustainably manage forest lands to meet their needs. However, the community based forest management systems are in the evolutionary stage. Current levels of research, field experimentation, policy study, and financial investments are woefully inadequate in responding to forest management problems. A massive increase in efforts to decentralise forest management and establish viable controls at the village level will be required if forest use is to be stablised before the ecological functions and productivity of these natural resources are lost." (Singh, Singh, and Kant, 1991)

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

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.