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Community Forestry: Ten Years in Review

Year of publication 1991

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Product type Book (stand-alone)

Series title Community Forestry Note

Series number 1020-3133

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) In the recent past community forestry has witnessed greater development and has influenced the nature of forestry activities more profoundly than any other field in the forestry profession: This alone justifies a review of the wealth of experience gained in community forestry during the last decade and an examination of its current orientations. Community forestry stems from the forestry profession's efforts to set up a new partnership with local people and to respond to the subsistence nee ds of growing rural populations. This new perspective was largely influenced by the rural development strategy advocated by the 1979 Programme of Action of the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development. But it was soon apparent that the involvement of rural communities in forestry required a new understanding of the many important links between trees and people. Of particular significance are the links between forestry and basic needs such as nutrition, food security, off-farm em ployment, energy and the integration of trees in resources management by rural people.

Language English

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    Environmental degradation evident in many countries today is often the result of conflict over access to forest and tree resources within communities, between communities, and between communities and outside entities. People in forest-based communities compete with one another for scarce forest resources for a variety of domestic uses, while at the same time growing needs of local rural and urban areas and of world markets have led to commercial exploitation of these same forests. Competition-le d conflicts are invariably complex because the different forest products have many different users, and decisions about use have long term effects. When national-level decisions and policies dealing with common resource management are made, they often ignore traditional rules of land and tree tenure. Growing inequity of access, as well as lack of confidence in future access, cause people to cut down forests and resist conservation efforts, as some individuals act in their own immediate interests rather than the community's long-term interests. Under such circumstances, traditional means of conflict management are often ineffectual in dealing with natural resource disputes; the resulting sense of powerlessness leads to estrangement of local communities from the national political process. At the same time, government agencies attempt to impose their authority upon local communities, for example by limiting forest access to larger entities to whom they provide permits, often with little success in controlling either local or external use. In the conflicts that ensue, between parties of such uneven power and with such disparate viewpoints, it is not only the environment that suffers.
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