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"forest commons"
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Trade-offs and synergies between carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons
Forests provide multiple benefits at local to global scales. These include the global public good of carbon sequestration and local and national level contributions to livelihoods for more than half a billion users. Forest commons are a particularly important class of forests generating these multiple benefits. Institutional arrangements to govern forest commons are believed to substantially influence carbon storage and livelihood contributions, especially when they incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making. However, hypothesized relationships between institutional factors and multiple benefits have never been tested on data from multiple countries. By using original data on 80 forest commons in 10 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, we show that larger forest size and greater rule-making autonomy at the local level are associated with high carbon storage and livelihood benefits; differences in ownership of forest commons are associated with trade-offs between livelihood benefits and carbon storage. We argue that local communities restrict their consumption of forest products when they own forest commons, thereby increasing carbon storage. In showing rule-making autonomy and ownership as distinct and important institutional influences on forest outcomes, our results are directly relevant to international climate change mitigation initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and avoided deforestation. Transfer of ownership over larger forest commons patches to local communities, coupled with payments for improved carbon storage can contribute to climate change mitigation without adversely affecting local livelihoods.
Journal Article
Forest commons and local enforcement
This article examines the relationship between local enforcement and forests used as commons. It uses a unique multicountry dataset, created over the past 15 years by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program. Drawing on original enforcement and forest commons data from 9 countries, we find that higher levels of local enforcement have a strong and positive but complex relationship to the probability of forest regeneration. This relationship holds even when the influence of a number of other factors such as user group size, subsistence, and commercial importance of forests, size of forest, and collective action for forest improvement activities is taken into account. Although several of the above factors have a statistically significant relationship to changes in the condition of forest commons, differences in levels of local enforcement strongly moderate their link with forest commons outcomes. The research, using data from diverse political, social, and ecological contexts, shows both the importance of enforcement to forest commons and some of the limits of forest governance through commons arrangements.
Journal Article
Impacts of 150 Years of Modernization Policies on the Management of Common Forests in Japan
After World War II, Japan’s policy makers believed that common forests were underutilized because of their legal status and organization method under customary iriai-type ownership and that modern ownership in the form of group ownership, such as forest producers’ cooperatives, or as individual, separate ownership, would improve the situation. Thus, the Common Forests Modernization Act of 1966 was enacted, following successive modernization policies since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. We evaluated the impacts of the past modernization policies on the management of common forests by statistically comparing the performance of modernized and non-modernized 19,690 common forests based on the World Census of Agriculture and Forestry 2000. The performance measures for comparison included planting, weeding, thinning, and harvesting activities. We found less modernized, customary holdings are more active in tending activities such as weeding and thinning, while modernized holdings may have an advantage in harvesting and timber sales.
Journal Article
Gendered Dynamics and Customary Complexity
This article pays attention to the implementation processes and gendered dynamics of Community Forest Management (CFM) in Burkina Faso and how this impacts everyday forest practices. This is done by exploring how implementation processes shape and are shaped by gendered inequities, exclusions, and resource struggles. Theoretically, this article draws on work from feminist political ecology (FPE) and critical institutionalism (CI) readings to investigate the gendered dynamics in outcomes and institutional processes of the CFM. Empirically, this is explored through ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Tonogo, Burkina Faso. The exploration of the CFM implementation was incited by observations made during the fieldwork around the contrasting environmental conditions of two forested areas: Kungin and Tangin. Although these forest areas are located in proximity to the same village and are governed within the same customary authority, their ecological status differs significantly. The analysis sheds light on the particularities in the gendered power dynamics and complexities of CFM implementation through local customary authorities. The study contributes to showing how the project initiation itself changes social relations and reinforces gendered marginalization. This study, moreover, contributes with empirical insights on how struggles over the right to the forests continue, although the CFM projects have been closed. This knowledge can contribute to forest development and restoration projects taking historical and gendered power relations seriously.
Journal Article
Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises
The road to sustainable forest management and stewardship has been debated for decades. Some advocate for governmental control and oversight. Some say that the only way to stem the tide of deforestation is to place as many tracts as possible under strict protection. Caught in the middle of this debate, forest inhabitants of the developing world struggle to balance the extraction of precarious livelihoods from forests while responding to increasing pressures from national governments, international institutions, and their own perceptions of environmental decline to protect biodiversity, restore forests, and mitigate climate change. Mexico presents a unique case in which much of the nation's forests were placed as commons in the hands of communities, who, with state support and their own entrepreneurial vigor, created community forest enterprises (CFEs). David Barton Bray, who has spent more than thirty years engaged with and researching Mexican community forestry, shows that this reform has transformed forest management in that country at a scale and level of maturity unmatched anywhere else in the world. For decades Mexico has been conducting a de facto large-scale experiment in the design of a national social-ecological system (SES) focused on community forests. What happens when you give subsistence communities rights over forests, as well as training, organizational support, equipment, and financial capital? Do the communities destroy the forest in the name of economic development, or do they manage them sustainably, generating current income while maintaining intergenerational value as a resource for their children? Bray shares the scientific and social evidence that can now begin to answer these questions. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and the interested public on the future of global forest resilience and the possibilities for a good Anthropocene.
eBook
Community Forestry Management Implementation in Burkina Faso: Gendered Dynamics and Customary Complexity
This article pays attention to the implementation processes and gendered dymics of Community Forest Magement (CFM) in Burki Faso and how this impacts everyday forest practices. This is done by exploring how implementation processes shape and are shaped by gendered inequities, exclusions, and resource struggles. Theoretically, this article draws on work from feminist political ecology (FPE) and critical institutiolism (CI) readings to investigate the gendered dymics in outcomes and institutiol processes of the CFM. Empirically, this is explored through ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Tonogo, Burki Faso. The exploration of the CFM implementation was incited by observations made during the fieldwork around the contrasting environmental conditions of two forested areas: Kungin and Tangin. Although these forest areas are located in proximity to the same village and are governed within the same customary authority, their ecological status differs significantly. The alysis sheds light on the particularities in the gendered power dymics and complexities of CFM implementation through local customary authorities. The study contributes to showing how the project initiation itself changes social relations and reinforces gendered margilization. This study, moreover, contributes with empirical insights on how struggles over the right to the forests continue, although the CFM projects have been closed. This knowledge can contribute to forest development and restoration projects taking historical and gendered power relations seriously.
Journal Article
Analyzing ecosystem functions in Bangladesh’s forests: a historical MODIS study
ABSTRACT The accelerating degradation and damage of forest ecosystems worldwide due to human activities represent a pressing concern. This is particularly evident in Bangladesh, where the majority of terrestrial biodiversity is concentrated within forest ecosystems. Our study explores four ecosystem functions and nine indicators such as net primary productivity (NPP), gross primary productivity (GPP), land surface temperature (LST), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), leaf area index (LAI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), evapotranspiration (ET) and potential evapotranspiration (PET). These elements were assessed using MODIS remote sensing data gathered from four co-managed forest protected areas (CFPA) and two bio-diverse non-co-managed forest areas (BNCFA) from 2002 to 2020. While co-management activities in CFPAs aim to conserve biodiversity, reduce local costs, and promote equitable management, BNCFAs function without such collaborative management efforts. Our findings revealed statistically similar ecosystem functions and their indicators across CFPAs and BNCFAs (t-test, p > 0.05). Seasonal patterns of ecosystem functions also show similar patterns. Interestingly, despite concerted efforts and special initiatives, CFPAs did not exhibit superior ecosystem functions when compared to BNCFAs. In conclusion, our study indicates that ecosystem functions have exhibited similarities across both spatial and temporal scales in the two management regimes.
Journal Article
The Community Forests of Mexico
Mexico leads the world in community management of forests for the commercial production of timber. Yet this success story is not widely known, even in Mexico, despite the fact that communities around the globe are increasingly involved in managing their own forest resources. To assess the achievements and shortcomings of Mexico’s community forest management programs and to offer approaches that can be applied in other parts of the world, this book collects fourteen articles that explore community forest management from historical, policy, economic, ecological, sociological, and political perspectives. The contributors to this book are established researchers in the field, as well as many of the important actors in Mexico’s nongovernmental organization sector. Some articles are case studies of community forest management programs in the states of Michoacán, Oaxaca, Durango, Quintana Roo, and Guerrero. Others provide broader historical and contemporary overviews of various aspects of community forest management. As a whole, this volume clearly establishes that the community forest sector in Mexico is large, diverse, and has achieved unusual maturity in doing what communities in the rest of the world are only beginning to explore: how to balance community income with forest conservation. In this process, Mexican communities are also managing for sustainable landscapes and livelihoods.
eBook
Transformation of resource management institutions under globalization
The context in which many self-governed commons systems operate will likely be significantly altered as globalization processes play out over the next few decades. Such dramatic changes will induce some systems to fail and subsequently to be transformed, rather than merely adapt. Despite this possibility, research on globalization-induced transformations of social-ecological systems (SESs) is still underdeveloped. We seek to help fill this gap by exploring some patterns of transformation in SESs and the question of what factors help explain the persistence of cooperation in the use of common-pool resources through transformative change. Through the analysis of 89 forest commons in South Korea that experienced such transformations, we found that there are two broad types of transformation, cooperative and noncooperative. We also found that two system-level properties, transaction costs associated group size and network diversity, may affect the direction of transformation. SESs with smaller group sizes and higher network diversity may better organize cooperative transformations when the existing system becomes untenable.
Journal Article