Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 1: Introduction: People, Forests and the Need for Adaptation • 3
to forest resources by forest users, market demands and the absence of
sustainable management practices, all of which had detrimental effects on
forests.
The move to involve people in forestry activities began with the assumption
that if rural people were part of the problem, then meeting some of their
needs for forest products and involving them in forest management activities
were part of the solution. As early as 1978, some of the ideas behind what
was generically called community forestry were presented in Forestry for
Local Community Development (FAO 1978). By this time, experiments in
‘community forestry’ were beginning in Nepal, and some other countries
were experimenting with the concept of ‘social forestry’.
Since the 1970s, people-oriented approaches to forestry have emerged and
matured in Asia, variously described as community forestry, communitybased
forest management, social forestry and joint forest management.
The initial focus on involving communities in government programmes
for reforestation and forest protection has gradually evolved towards more
devolution of decision-making power (at least at the level of policy discourse
and rhetoric, but less obviously in practice) and more active use of forests
by the local communities. From a relatively naive effort to ‘educate’ forestdependent
peoples about the importance of trees and reorganise existing
social arrangements for forestry activities, community forestry programmes
have become much more sophisticated, focusing on real decision-making
authority at the local level, changes in forest governance, and devolution
of previously denied rights and responsibilities.
Devolution of forest management is now a stated policy objective in many
countries, but how much devolution has really occurred? A recent study
in several countries shows that far from devolving management authority
to the people who actually use and need the forests at the local level,
devolution policies have sometimes actually decreased local control of
forests (Edmunds and Wollenberg 2003). For example, a case study of
Orissa found that existing local forest management systems were pushed
to conform to rules under the state’s Joint Forest Management programme,
reducing the decision-making role of communities (Sarin et al. 2003).
Whether this pattern holds generally is not certain, although anecdotal
and other evidence suggests that devolution has had limited effect (for
overviews, see Fisher 1999; Fisher et al. 2000; Colfer and Capistrano 2005).
Given that one rationale for devolution policies is that they will better meet
local needs for forest products, especially those of poor and marginalised