Community Forest Management

Historically, some form of local management of forests existed in many parts of the world in the precolonial era. Enclosures, invasions, colonization, or policies of postcolonial states led to the takeover of most of these forests and a breakdown in local or community management. Traditional forms of such community forestry are perhaps now present only in some parts of South America and Southeast Asia. However, since the 1980s, community forest management (CFM) has (re-)emerged as an important element of forest policy, especially in countries in the Global South, and this forms the focus of this review. CFM has taken many forms involving varying degrees of autonomy for communities and, conversely, state involvement (see General Overview). These variations emerge from the varying rationales for CFM, ranging from arguments from the common pool resource literature (see the Oxford Bibliographies article Common Pool Resources) such as administrative efficiency or conservation effectiveness to rights-based arguments that invoke human rights, rights of indigenous peoples, and democratic rights of local communities over their resources. This diversity, in turn, means that there are diverse definitions of what constitutes successful CFM and ways of measuring it (see subsection on Defining and Measuring Success). Explaining why CFM may succeed or fail is even more challenging and involves economic, institutional, and power-related factors (see section on Factors Influencing Outcomes). Gender discrimination is a particular power-laden process that affects CFM (see section on Gender and Community Forestry). The forms, outcomes, and explanations for CFM also vary enormously by region. Given this diversity and size of the literature, we provide a sampling of the literature from four countries or regions from the Global South (countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, Nepal, and India) where CFM has been extensive, and provide one section on North America and Europe as representing the Global North, where some pockets of CFM exist.