Forests Sourcebook - HCV Resource Network

NOTE 1.2
Community-Based Forest Management
An often overlooked trend in the world is a doubling
of community tenure in the past 15 years.
During this time, the area under private but collective
ownership has increased from 143.3 million to 246.3
million hectares of forests. Similarly, the estimated area
under public but collective administration has increased
from 18.5 million to 131.4 million hectares. In sum,
community-owned and administered forest totals at least
377 million hectares, or at least 22 percent of all forests in
developing countries and three times as much forest as is
owned by industry or individuals (White and Martin 2002).
Poverty alleviation strategies in the forestry sector have
emphasized local participation to make forest management
more responsive to local needs and to increase benefits
flowing to forest users. As more of the world’s forests come
under community tenure, community-based forest management
(CBFM) practices are continually being promoted
as playing an important role in poverty alleviation, good
governance, and sustainable use of the environment.
Involving communities in sustainable forest resource use
is not a new concept. In 1977, the World Bank Forestry Sector
Review (World Bank 1977) noted that many forestry
projects failed without the collaboration of local residents
and that their collaboration improved environmental outcomes.
It stressed the need to learn more about how to support
policies that successfully give management and benefits
to smallholders and the need to better understand local
use, forestry-related practices, and traditional institutions.
Learning from these lessons and the growing evidence of
positive outcomes of CBFM, the current World Bank strategy
focuses on, among other goals, using forests for poverty
alleviation and strengthening local governance and transparency
to address corruption. CBFM can be an important
entry point for achieving these goals. It can also be an outcome
of good policy related to poverty, governance, and the
environment.
CBFM includes the empowerment of, or in some cases,
the recognition of the rights of, local communities to sustainably
manage, control, use, and benefit from local forest
resources (see boxes 1.9 and 1.10). It implies a legal, political,
and economic framework that puts local people at the
center of forestry. Community objectives for managing forest
land can include conservation, sustainable use, local
control, economic development, and mixes of these objectives.
While the state and large private operators have a role
to play in the management of forests, in many instances,
improved effectiveness, equity, and efficiency are outcomes
of community-based approaches.
Community management of forests and other lands is
larger in scale and more intensely linked to other sectors
than is commonly acknowledged. From a management and
use perspective, essentially all forests, however remote and
seemingly physically unoccupied, have traditional owners
and users. The assumption should not be a need to impose
outside management over “unmanaged” or vacant lands but
a need to carefully assess traditional systems, owners, and
users of forests. Recent work in Gabon, a highly forested
and lightly populated country, shows that even there traditional
use zones abut one another and there is no
“unclaimed” forest land. Frequently, the issue is recognition
of existing or traditional local rights rather than transfer of
new rights to the local level, as is illustrated in the India case
study (see box 1.12; also note 1.3, Indigenous Peoples and
Forests).
A variety of outside interventions can be used to support
CBFM, including grants and loans, policy support programs
and projects, global environment funds, and biodiversity
conservation activities. However, CBFM is not the
use of communities to achieve the objectives of outsiders,
no matter how laudable these objectives may be. CBFM is
the empowerment of communities to use and manage
forests to achieve their own objectives.
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