Global Gleanings: Lessons from Six Studies of Community Based Forest Management

"Community forestry challenges the inequity and social injustice that have historically accompanied forest resource extraction, and it makes the claim that achieving ecological sustainability is not possible without also achieving social sustainability." (Kussel and Baker, 2002)

This 34-page paper brings together the findings of 6 reviews commissioned by the Ford Foundation to contribute to an ongoing process of learning about community-based forest management (CBFM). As author Nicholas K. Menzies explains, the Foundation was motivated by the observation that rural people are among the most disadvantaged in any country, and that access to critical natural resources represents an important approach for reducing poverty and injustice. The Foundation's early strategy of increasing agricultural productivity through support for research in the agricultural sciences has evolved towards a concern for building and strengthening the institutions in government, civil society, and within communities which shape the lives of rural people; hence the focus on both CBFM and the closely related concept of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM).

Menzies begins by providing a history of CBFM around the world, emphasising that the emergence of CBFM is rooted in the histories of rural and forest-dependent communities and of development efforts focused on these communities. He moves on to consider CBFM's characteristics, drivers, and impacts over time, in the process highlighting a lack of documentation and sharing of information on this subject which he thinks limits the possibilities for learning and advocacy. "Despite the difficulty of collecting and analyzing statistics on forest cover on a global scale, it is clear that CBFM affects a significant proportion of the world's forests, and a large number of rural, forest communities."

Recognising the potential of this communication strategy - but the dearth of good impact data to support it - The Ford Foundation has set aside funds within each of its CBFM-related programmes to support a sustained learning effort and to communicate the results of that learning. Specifically, the 6 reviews explored in this paper were independently commissioned and are country-based as well as thematic; they include studies from China, India, Mexico, the Philippines, and the United States. The expectation is that the studies of CBFM networks (which were jointly funded by the Ford Foundation and the Department of International Development - DFID) would be published as books or shorter working papers, presented at international conferences, and/or circulated among relevant national institutions. To facilitate discussion of the issues that have emerged, the Foundation has commissioned this synthesis of the 6 reviews to highlight common issues, to point to where national or local conditions have shaped the evolution of CBFM, and to propose some directions for the future.

According to Menzies, there are two important streams within the movement towards CBFM: one emphasises the potential of CBFM to promote more sustainable forest management and to benefit local people at the same time; the other highlights the injustice of excluding forest communities from forests and from decision-making about forests and draws from the concerns of the international movement for human rights and social justice. Menzies explains that these two streams of concern within CBFM have been incorporated into and amplified by international interest in good governance as a precondition for sustainable development. "While this has shaped a favorable political environment for CBFM, it also raises questions about the ways in which international trends have molded policies and programs that seek to empower the local. Several of the studies also observe that to the extent that decentralization has applied to forest management, governments tend to hand over the most burdensome tasks and the lowest value resources to communities while keeping the attractive activities and resources for themselves."

Menzies provides a detailed review of the impacts of national, regional, and global networks promoting CBFM. In short, "All six studies point to considerable achievements over the last twenty years....There is evidence from most ongoing CBFM programs of reduced levels of conflict between forest management agencies and communities. Many forest communities do now enjoy increased agricultural productivity (China), or a net infusion of capital into CBFM project areas (Philippines), or substantial investments in community-level assets such as schools, public buildings, and community enterprises (Mexico). The reviews all point out that it is difficult to ascribe such changes directly to CBFM programs, but that there is evidence of improved livelihoods." That said, Menzies stresses that there is concern that, in many cases, the impact of CBFM is limited to project sites and to the duration of project funding. Also, CBFM programmes "may be hostage to changing fashions and paradigms in the international development community."

Furthermore, the networking strategy drawn upon by the programmes reviewed in these studies can itself present a challenge: "inclusive, participatory and democratic networks may have difficulty reaching a level of consensus which makes them credible advocates in national and international fora." Networks can be hampered in trying to remedy the very weak documentation and communication of CBFM impact alluded to above when information technology (IT) is relied on solely; not only may these networks need separate strategies for the purposes of advocacy, on the one hand, and circulating information to build the capacities of community-level institutions, on the other, but these community-level organisations in less developed countries may not be able to communicate their activities/evaluation data at all if reliance on email and internet becomes the norm. Hard-copy (printed) materials and more accessible/less costly media such as CD-ROMs could be helpful in this regard, Menzies suggests. Another strategy for enhancing dissemination of CBFM-related information involves strengthening efforts and funds to translate materials into languages other than English - especially local languages.

The author then sets out in detail the common themes identified by the 6 studies, asking a series of questions, such as how the concept of building social capital can help strengthen CBFM activities, how partnership can contribute to the success of CBFM as a strategy, and how communities can gain access to relevant, useful skills for forest management. Along the lines of the latter theme, Menzies stresses that initiatives proposing re-orienting national and international natural resource management (NRM) should not lose sight of rich, long traditions of communities caring for the forests on which they depend for wood and fiber, medicinal plants, food, and spiritual meaning. Nor should the diversity of locally initiated and locally supported actions to manage forests and other natural resources be obscured. Among the other recommendations to emerge from the studies:

• Initiate a process of strategic planning to develop a shared vision of CBFM
• Conduct an open and self-critical situational analysis to clarify who are the key actors in CBFM
• Make a concerted effort to identify ways to support local organisations, carrying out a critical examination of the benefits and costs of CBFM to these organisations.
• Actively engage policy and decision makers.
• Emphasise the need to craft inclusive, equitable and accountable organisations.
• Support efforts to formulate and test innovative mechanisms for communities to capture the value of ecosystem services derived from their management of forest
  resources.
• Ask this question: Is CBFM the most effective strategy to achieve sustainable and equitable improvements in rural livelihoods?

Menzies concludes that CBFM has reached a position where it can make a shift from experimental projects to becoming institutionalised as an accepted model of management, but that in order for this to happen partners in the projects still have to work to reach a shared understanding that keeps communities at the centre of forest management - sustaining active involvement for maximum benefit.