Thumbnail Image

Community forest monitoring and the social reproduction of inequalities in Ghana

XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022









Also available in:
No results found.

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Thumbnail Image
    Article
    Does independent forest monitoring reduce forest infringement? Insights from Ghana’s collaborative mobile-based IFM system
    XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
    2022
    Also available in:
    No results found.

    Independent Forest Monitoring (IFM) has been a feature of international effort to improve forest governance since its beginning in Cambodia in 1999. Today, IFM has gained traction and is an integral element of emerging forest governance schemes such as voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) which seeks to promote trade in legal timber between EU member countries and timber-producing countries in the global south. Within the VPA, IFM aims to complement the national due diligence mechanisms by flagging illegalities and providing opportunities for redress. Ghana is one such country where IFM is emerging within the country's VPA to address perennial forest governance challenges including corruption. This is often done through projects that develop and train communities on forest laws and provide them with mobile phones and appropriate software applications to monitor and flagged illegalities within their localities. Although this has been done over the years little insights are available on how this IFM architecture has performed. Such analysis is required to understand if IFM presents any hope for sanitizing the forest sector. On the back of this, this paper review community IFM monitoring reports identify key trends on forest illegalities and how they were addressed or otherwise. We found that the real-time monitoring platform has generated 747 alerts as of December 2019. Nearly 72% of them have been verified with most Social Responsibility Agreement (SRA) related infractions resulting in some 32 communities receiving SRA for the first time or on a continuous basis. The study concludes that communities are now protecting their forest as a result of compliance from timber companies which has generated revenue in the form of social responsibility agreements for community projects. Managers of the forest reserves are now responsive to queries as a result of the digital nature of the alerts. Keywords: Monitoring and data collection, Deforestation and forest degradation, Sustainable forest management, Governance ID: 3470164
  • Thumbnail Image
    Article
    Community capacity for social enterprise development: Empirical evidence from community forest enterprises (CFEs) in Cameroon
    XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
    2022
    Also available in:
    No results found.

    Community forest enterprises (CFEs) are emerging as sustainable options for local development, these enterprises trade to meet their social and environmental goals, thus characterizing them as social enterprises. However, knowledge of the capacity of these communities to develop and effectively manage CFEs is not well known. With inspiration from the organizational capacity theory, the asset-based community development (ABCD) theory, a framework for community capacity is developed. Based on data from a sample of 31 communities, principal component analysis, descriptive statistics, and the Pearson correlation test was used to evaluate community capacity and the relationship between dimensions of community capacity. The findings reveal that natural resource availability received the highest score (4.08), thus underlying the fact that these communities are endowed with natural resources that can propel their growth if managed sustainably. However, other dimensions of community capacity are poor, community capacity for partnerships and social networking was the lowest (1.33), followed by infrastructure (1.38), skills and knowledge of members (1.58) was equally very low with significant poor knowledge in enterprise development, marketing, and financial management. The overall sense of community was poor averaging 2.84 on a scale of 5, community capacity for financial management was equally not very good (3.94). Although participation was not very poor in most cases, women, youths, and minority groups need to be empowered further to participate actively in community activities. Correlation analysis reveals that some of these domains are highly correlated, thus when one is triggered, there is a positive spill-over effect on other dimensions. Financial management capacity, participation, leadership, and resource mobilization emerge as key dimensions that when triggered can have significant positive effects on other domains of community capacity. Keywords: Sustainable forest management, Governance, Education, Decent employment, Economic Development ID: 3486804
  • Thumbnail Image
    Article
    Social forestry programs: A responsible investment to support sustainable forest management and provide alternative income for local communities, Indonesia
    XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
    2022
    Also available in:
    No results found.

    Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) has had a long experience in Indonesia to support the sustainable forest management. The CBFM approach has evolved into a new model, i.e., Social Forestry (SF). The SF drives to a more legal access from local community to utilize forest area. This SF opens opportunity for a more responsible investment by private sector to create cooperation’s with community organizations. The Forest Investment Program-1 implements CBFM through SF and has conducted activities in 17 villages, targeted a 17,000 ha into an agreement between communities with FMU and private sectors. A SWOT analysis is used to identify potential commodities in the targeted village and also to assess capacity of community organization. Interviews and focused group discussions were conducted to facilitate the development of a proposed cooperation with external parties for potential investment. Within the FIP-1 villages, there are five licenses for Social Forestry. Additionally, 6 new licenses are in the process. A total of USD 5 Million investment is planned for 17 villages. In average, for those 5 villages that has obtained SF licenses, a total of USD 1.6 Million have been invested in creating alternative livelihood, including USD 100 K/village for bee keeping, aquaculture and handicraft business development, USD 1.3 M for forestry program, and USD 222 K for village infrastructure program. Keywords: social forestry, sustainable forest management, Kalimantan, community forest ID: 3488277

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.