Forests for People: Community Rights and Forest Tenure Reform

Who has rights to forests and forest resources? In recent years governments in the South have transferred at least 200 million hectares of forests to communities living in and around them. This book assesses the experience of what appears to be a new international trend that has substantially increased the share of the world's forests under community administration. Based on research in over 30 communities in selected countries in Asia (India, Nepal, Philippines, Laos, Indonesia), Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana) and Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua), it examines the process and outcomes of granting new rights, assessing a variety of governance issues in implementation, access to forest products and markets and outcomes for people and forests.

Forest tenure reforms have been highly varied, ranging from the titling of indigenous territories to the granting of small land areas for forest regeneration or the right to a share in timber revenues. While in many cases these rights have been significant, new statutory rights do not automatically result in rights in practice, and a variety of institutional weaknesses and policy distortions have limited the impacts of change. Through the comparison of selected cases, the chapters explore the nature of forest reform, the extent and meaning of rights transferred or recognized, and the role of authority and citizens' networks in forest governance. They also assess opportunities and obstacles associated with government regulations and markets for forest products and the effects across the cases on livelihoods, forest condition and equity.

Published with CIFOR.

Anne M Larson is Senior Research Associate with the Center for International Forestry Research and is based in Nicaragua. Her research has focused on conservation and development, decentralization, indigenous rights and forest governance. She holds a PhD in Wildland Resource Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.S. in Environmental Science from Stanford University.

Deborah Barry is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Director of Country Programs for the Rights and Resources Initiative, based in Washington, DC. An economic and cultural geographer, her recent areas of work have been on community forestry in Mexico and Central America, forest tenure and governance and payment for environmental services with a concern for equity.

Ganga Ram Dahal is a Research Consultant at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). He obtained his PhD in Forest Policy and Governance from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. His main areas of work include decentralisation, forest tenure, community forestry and institutions.

Carol J. Pierce Colfer is an Anthropologist and Principal Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research. In recent years her work has focused on adaptive collaborative management of forests, devolution and decentralization in forests, and landscape level forest governance. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from University of Washington in Seattle, 1974; and MPH (Master of Public Health) in International Health from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1979.