Forestry & Forest Sciences · Forest Management, Policy, Economics & Society · also Social Forestry, Joint Forest Management and Tribal Realities, Tribology, Community-Based Forest Management
Forestry with and for people: social and farm forestry, joint and community forest management, forest-dependent and tribal communities, gender and livelihoods.
In the exams: IFoS Forestry Paper I Section B (agroforestry, social forestry, JFM and tribal realities); ICAR AIEEA-PG Group 09 (social, farm, community forestry; JFM; tribology; shifting cultivation; taungya); ICAR AICE-JRF 59 Unit 5
Forests across the developing world, and in many richer countries, are not empty spaces managed only by forest departments. Hundreds of millions of people live in and around them and depend on them for fuel, fodder, food, medicines, building materials, cash income and cultural identity. Many are indigenous or tribal peoples whose relationship with forests long predates the colonial or national state. For most of the twentieth century, forestry policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America treated these people mainly as a threat to be kept out. Since the 1970s, a series of movements, experiments and reforms has shifted the emphasis towards forestry with and for people: social forestry, joint forest management, community forestry and the legal recognition of community and indigenous forest rights.
This subject covers the concepts of social, farm, extension and community forestry; the history of people's participation in forestry; joint forest management, its institutions and benefit sharing; community forestry models worldwide, with Nepal, Mexico, the Philippines and Tanzania as main examples; tribal and forest-dependent communities, their social structure and livelihoods; shifting cultivation and taungya; forest rights and tenure security; gender in forestry; participatory rural appraisal and microplanning; and conflict management in forest use. The legal texts of national forest and rights laws, and the theory of decentralisation and common-pool resources, are covered in forest-policy-law-governance; grazing commons and pastoral communities in rangeland-management; agroforestry and farm forestry design in agroforestry-systems-design; and community-based certification and legality in certification-sustainable-forest-management and the Sustainability track's sustainable-supply-chains. This manual refers to them rather than repeating them.
The manual is written for students preparing for civil-service forestry examinations, postgraduate and doctoral forestry entrance examinations in South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia, and forester licensure examinations, and for forest officers, NGO staff and researchers working with forest communities anywhere. Examples are drawn from Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Statistics on committees, titles and areas change with each report and are given as approximate values.
Social forestry is forestry that aims to meet the needs of rural people, especially the poor, for fuel, fodder, small timber and other products, and to involve them in growing and managing trees. Jack Westoby, an FAO economist, is credited with using the term in 1968, and national planning bodies in South Asia, such as India's National Commission on Agriculture (1976), popularised it in the 1970s, recommending that forestry outside reserved forests meet local needs and so reduce pressure on production forests. The concept had several components. Farm forestry is the growing of trees by farmers on their own land, on boundaries, bunds and in woodlots, for their own use and for sale. Extension forestry is the planting of trees on public land outside forests, such as along roads, canals and railway lines (strip plantations), on village wastelands and on degraded forest near villages. Community forestry, in this usage, was the raising of trees by communities on common land, for the community's benefit. Recreational forestry provides amenity plantations near towns.
FAO's 1978 publication Forestry for Local Community Development defined community forestry broadly as any situation that intimately involves local people in a forestry activity, from tree growing by individual households to community management of natural forests and the processing of forest products by local enterprises. Later usage distinguishes community-based forest management, in which communities have substantial rights and responsibilities for managing forests, often natural forests on state or community land, from programmes that simply employ local people or plant trees for them.
These terms overlap. Agroforestry, described in agroforestry-systems-design, emphasises the integration of trees with crops and livestock and overlaps strongly with farm forestry. Social forestry is an umbrella for programmes serving local needs, while joint forest management and community forest management concern the governance of forests, especially state forests, by or with communities. In practice, what matters is who has rights to the land and trees, who makes decisions, who bears the costs and who receives the benefits. Programmes that use participatory language but leave rights and decisions entirely with the state are participatory in name only.
Large social forestry projects, many funded by the World Bank and bilateral donors in South Asia, East Africa and elsewhere from the late 1970s and 1980s, distributed hundreds of millions of seedlings and established village woodlots and strip plantations. Farm forestry was the most successful component in terms of trees planted, especially eucalyptus grown for pulp and poles in South Asia and fast-growing species in Kenya and elsewhere, but much of the wood went to markets rather than meeting local fuel and fodder needs, and some richer farmers converted cropland to eucalyptus, reducing agricultural employment. Community woodlots on village commons often failed because communities were not given secure rights or a share in decisions and benefits, so the plantations were seen as government property; the poor, who depended on the commons for grazing, sometimes lost access. These lessons fed directly into the design of joint forest management.
Before colonial rule, forests in Asia, Africa and the Americas were used and managed under a wide variety of customary arrangements, with rulers often claiming valuable trees and hunting rights. Colonial governments created forest departments and forest laws that declared large areas state forest, settled or extinguished customary rights, and regulated grazing, collection and cultivation: the Dutch in Java from the nineteenth century, the British in South Asia (forest department 1864; forest acts of 1865, 1878 and 1927) and Burma, and later in East and West Africa, and the French in Indochina and West Africa. Settlement often recorded rights incompletely, especially those of shifting cultivators and nomadic groups, and many communities became 'encroachers' on land they had long used. Resistance ranged from everyday non-compliance to uprisings in which forest grievances played a part. Some concessions created early forms of community management, such as the van panchayats of the Kumaon hills in the Himalaya, set up under rules of 1931 after protests against reservation, which still manage village forests.
After independence, forest policy in 1952 emphasised national needs and industry, and conflict between forest departments and local people continued. The Chipko movement, which began in 1973 in the Garhwal Himalaya when villagers prevented contractors from felling trees by embracing them, became a symbol of people's claims to forests; at Reni in 1974, women led by Gaura Devi stopped a felling, and leaders such as Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna brought national attention. The Appiko movement in Karnataka, from 1983, applied similar methods in the Western Ghats.
At the same time, practical experiments showed that cooperation could work. At Arabari in West Bengal, from 1971 to 1972, forester A. K. Banerjee involved villagers in protecting degraded sal forest in return for employment and a share of products, and the forest regenerated; Arabari is regarded as the forerunner of joint forest management. At Sukhomajri in Haryana, from the late 1970s, a watershed project led by P. R. Mishra built small dams to protect a reservoir from siltation; villagers agreed to stop grazing in the catchment in return for shares in irrigation water and grass, and the hills regreened.
From the late 1980s, a wave of policy reform in many countries shifted forest law towards local needs and participation. Nepal's Forest Act of 1993 gave the legal basis for handing national forests to community forest user groups. India's National Forest Policy of 1988 declared that the domestic needs of rural and tribal people should be the first charge on forest produce, and joint forest management guidelines followed in 1990, later strengthened; India's Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognised individual and community forest rights. The Philippines adopted community-based forest management as its national strategy in 1995, Tanzania's Forest Act of 2002 provided for joint and community-based management, and Mexico's agrarian law confirmed ejido and community ownership of much forest land. In Latin America, many countries recognised indigenous territories in their constitutions, and in Indonesia a 2013 Constitutional Court decision held that customary forests are not state forests. International instruments, notably ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), supported this shift.
Joint or collaborative forest management is a partnership in which the state keeps ownership of a forest but shares responsibility for protecting and managing it, and a share of its benefits, with a neighbouring community. It differs from community forestry proper, in which the community itself holds the management rights or the land. The community, organised as a committee or user group, protects the forest from illicit felling, fire and uncontrolled grazing; the forest agency provides technical support, funds for works and legal backing, and allows the community to collect specified products and to receive a share of any final harvest. The terms are set in an agreement or management plan approved by the agency.
The model appears on several continents. India adopted joint forest management (JFM) by a national resolution in 1990; committees go by names such as forest protection committees, village forest committees or, around protected areas, ecodevelopment committees, with an elected executive committee and often the local forester as member-secretary. National guidelines of 2000 recommended that women make up about half of the general body and a third of the executive committee, and by the late 2000s over 100,000 committees were reported, covering more than 20 million hectares, though many were inactive. Tanzania's Forest Act of 2002 provides for joint forest management of central and local government forest reserves alongside community-based management of village land forests. In Uganda, collaborative forest management agreements are signed between community groups and the National Forestry Authority for central forest reserves, and Ethiopia has promoted participatory forest management in its high forests. Nepal's collaborative forest management in the Terai lowlands shares large blocks of national forest between the state, local governments and distant as well as nearby users.
Benefits under joint management usually include rights to collect non-timber forest products, grass, fallen wood and lops and tops; employment in forestry works; village development funds; and a share of the proceeds of final harvest of timber or bamboo. The share is set by national or provincial rules: in India it varies by state, commonly from about 25 to 50 percent, and in Tanzania benefit-sharing arrangements for joint management of government reserves were long left unresolved, a frequent complaint of participating villages. For example, if a jointly managed area yields timber sold for 1,000,000 currency units and the rule gives the community 25 percent, the community receives 250,000 currency units; at 50 percent, 500,000. Because regenerating degraded forest takes many years to produce timber, the immediate benefits for most villagers come from fuel, fodder, NTFPs and employment, and a scheme that promises only distant timber revenue struggles to keep members committed.
Joint management has helped regenerate degraded forests in many places, such as the sal forests of eastern India and montane forests in East Africa, and has improved relations between forest agencies and villagers. Evaluations across countries identify recurring problems: committees created by executive orders or project rules rather than law lacked secure status and could be dissolved by the agency; decisions were dominated by the forest agency, which controlled funds and plans; benefits from final harvest were delayed, unclear or never paid; influential households captured decisions, excluding women, landless people and those who depended most on the forest; closures to grazing and fuel collection placed heavy burdens on the poorest and on women; committees became inactive when donor or project funding ended; and joint management overlapped with local government and with newer rights-based institutions. Where laws later gave communities ownership or statutory rights over forest resources, as India's Forest Rights Act and Tanzania's village land forest reserves do, these are often seen as more empowering successors, while joint management continues where the state keeps the land.
Nepal's community forestry programme is one of the most widely studied in the world. After the nationalisation of forests in 1957, which weakened local management, and concern about deforestation in the hills, Nepal began handing forests back to communities from the late 1970s. The Forest Act of 1993 and the Forest Regulations of 1995 provided the legal basis: any part of a national forest can be handed over to a community forest user group (CFUG), a self-governing, autonomous and perpetual body registered with the District Forest Office, to develop, conserve and use the forest according to an operational plan approved by the District Forest Office. The CFUG has a constitution, elects an executive committee, sets rules for harvesting and protection, sells forest products and keeps the income, which is used for forest management, community development and support to poor households. The programme has expanded to more than 20,000 CFUGs managing a substantial share of Nepal's forest, often cited as roughly a third, involving a large share of households. The Federation of Community Forestry Users, Nepal (FECOFUN), formed in 1995, represents user groups. Studies show improved forest cover in the middle hills and substantial contributions to local development, alongside problems of elite capture, unequal benefits, and over-cautious management that under-uses forest productivity. Leasehold forestry and collaborative forest management in the Terai are related programmes.
In the Philippines, community-based forest management (CBFM) was adopted as the national strategy for sustainable forest management by Executive Order 263 in 1995. Organised communities, called people's organisations, receive community-based forest management agreements (CBFMAs) giving tenure over forest land for 25 years, renewable for another 25, in return for protecting, rehabilitating and managing the forest under a community resource management framework and annual work plans. CBFM built on earlier programmes such as the Integrated Social Forestry Program (1982), which granted stewardship certificates to upland farmers. Outcomes have been mixed: secure tenure and support enabled some communities to protect and use forests well, but frequent policy changes, suspension of harvesting permits and limited technical support undermined others.
In Mexico, a large share of forests is owned by ejidos and indigenous communities under land reforms of the twentieth century, and many run community forest enterprises that harvest and process timber, with some certified under FSC. In Guatemala, community concessions in the multiple-use zone of the Maya Biosphere Reserve have maintained forest cover better than neighbouring areas while harvesting timber and non-timber products. In Tanzania, participatory forest management includes community-based management of village land forest reserves and joint management of government forest reserves. Global analyses by the Rights and Resources Initiative show that a growing, though still minority, share of the world's forests is legally owned by or designated for indigenous peoples and local communities. Across countries, research finds that community management works best with secure, clearly defined rights, real decision-making power, fair benefit sharing, effective local institutions consistent with Ostrom's design principles (described in rangeland-management), and supportive rather than controlling government agencies.
Indigenous and tribal peoples, estimated by the ILO at about 476 million people in more than 90 countries, live in or depend on a large share of the world's forests, from the Amazon and Congo basins to the boreal north, the uplands of South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. International law recognises their distinct status. ILO Convention 107 of 1957 took an integrationist approach; ILO Convention 169 of 1989 replaced it with recognition of indigenous and tribal peoples' rights to their lands, resources and institutions and a duty to consult them. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in 2007, affirms rights to lands, territories and resources and the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for measures and projects affecting them.
National recognition takes many forms. Brazil's 1988 Constitution recognises indigenous peoples' original rights to the lands they traditionally occupy, which the federal government must demarcate. The Philippines' Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act of 1997 provides for certificates of ancestral domain title. In Australia, the High Court's Mabo decision of 1992 recognised native title. India's Constitution provides special schedules for tribal areas, with village assemblies given ownership of minor forest produce under a 1996 law; and Liberia's Community Rights Law of 2018 and Kenya's Community Land Act of 2016 recognise community ownership of customary land in Africa.
Social structure is varied. Many communities are organised in clans and lineages with customary institutions, such as village councils and headmen, that govern land, resources, disputes and ritual. Customary law often treats land and forests as collectively held, with individual or household use rights, and religious beliefs frequently tie the community to particular forests, groves, hills and rivers; sacred groves (described in conservation-biology-genetic-resources) are part of this relationship. 'Tribology', in some forestry curricula, means the study of tribal communities and their relationship with forests. Policy has swung between protection, assimilation and integration with rights in many countries, a debate exemplified in South Asia by the anthropologist Verrier Elwin's argument for protecting tribal culture from exploitation.
Forest-dependent households derive a significant part of their livelihoods from forests: fuelwood, fodder and grazing; food such as tubers, fruits, mushrooms, honey, wild meat and leafy vegetables; medicines; materials for houses, tools and crafts; and cash from non-timber forest products (NTFPs), also called minor forest produce. Important traded products differ by region: shea nuts and butter in the West African savanna, Brazil nuts and açaí in the Amazon, rattan and benzoin in Southeast Asia, chicle and xate palm in Mesoamerica, and tendu (Diospyros melanoxylon) leaves for bidi wrappers, mahua (Madhuca longifolia) flowers and seeds, sal seeds and lac in central India. Collection is often seasonal and done largely by women. Comparative household surveys across tropical countries have found that forests supply a substantial share of income, often a fifth to two-fifths, with higher shares for the poorest.
Collectors often receive low prices from traders or from state agencies holding monopolies on particular products. Responses include secure tenure for extractive communities, such as Brazil's extractive reserves created from 1990 for rubber tappers and other extractivists; collective marketing through cooperatives, as with women's shea butter groups in West Africa; minimum support prices for minor forest produce, introduced in India from 2013-14; and transfer of ownership of NTFPs to village assemblies, which in parts of India now sell bamboo and tendu themselves.
Shifting cultivation, or swidden agriculture, known by local names such as jhum in South and Southeast Asia's eastern Himalaya, ladang in Indonesia and Malaysia, kaingin in the Philippines, milpa in Mesoamerica, roça in Brazil and chitemene in Zambia, is a farming system in which a patch of forest is cut, dried and burnt, cropped for one to a few years, and then left fallow to regrow as forest, restoring soil fertility and suppressing weeds, before the cycle returns to the same patch. It is practised by many indigenous and tribal communities in the uplands of South and Southeast Asia and widely in Africa and Latin America. Swidden fields typically grow a mixture of crops, such as upland rice, maize, millets, pulses, vegetables, tubers, cotton and spices, giving a diverse diet from one field, and fields are allocated and the cycle managed by village or clan institutions.
With long fallows, often 15 to 30 years in the past, shifting cultivation can be sustainable: forest regrows, soil organic matter and nutrients recover, and biodiversity persists in the mosaic of fallows. Population growth, land loss to reserved forests, plantations and development, and market pressures have shortened the cycle in many areas to as little as a few years, so that fallows do not recover fertility, weeds increase, yields fall and erosion increases on steep slopes. The land needed per household depends on the cycle: if a household crops 1 hectare for 2 years in a cycle with 10 years of fallow, the total cycle is 12 years and it needs 1 x 12 / 2 = 6 hectares in rotation; shortening the fallow to 4 years cuts the need to 3 hectares, but at the cost of soil recovery.
Policy towards shifting cultivation has often aimed to replace it with settled agriculture, terraced fields, horticulture or plantations, sometimes with limited success because alternatives did not suit the terrain, markets or culture. More recent approaches seek to improve rather than abolish it: lengthening fallows where land allows, enriching fallows with useful or nitrogen-fixing trees, as in the alder-based jhum of the Angami Nagas at Khonoma in Nagaland, where Alnus nepalensis is pollarded in fields; contour hedgerows and soil conservation on slopes; agroforestry and horticulture on fallow land; and securing community land rights so that communities can plan land use. Forest departments should recognise that swidden land is often community land under customary law, and that in many upland regions of Asia and Africa much forest classed as state or 'unclassed' land is in fact managed by communities.
Taungya, from Burmese words meaning hill cultivation, is a system in which farmers grow agricultural crops between rows of young forest trees during the first few years of a plantation, in return for planting and tending the trees. It was formalised in Burma in the 1850s by Dietrich Brandis for teak and spread to India, where it was used to establish teak, sal and other plantations, and to Africa and elsewhere. Forms include departmental taungya, in which the forest department hires labour and the workers grow crops; leasehold taungya, in which plots are leased to cultivators; and village taungya, in which families settled in forest villages provide labour in return for cultivation rights. Taungya reduces plantation establishment costs and provides land to landless people, but the taungya workers, especially in forest villages, historically had insecure rights and poor living conditions. Rights-recognition laws in some countries now provide for converting such forest villages into ordinary villages with secure land rights. The relation of taungya to agroforestry is discussed in agroforestry-systems-design.
Forest tenure determines who can use what resources, for how long and under what conditions. Schlager and Ostrom (1992) described property rights as bundles: access (to enter an area), withdrawal (to take products), management (to regulate use and transform the resource), exclusion (to decide who else may access and use it) and alienation (to sell or lease the other rights). Different holders may have different combinations; for example, a JFM committee may have access and withdrawal rights for some products and a share in management, but not exclusion or alienation, while a Nepal CFUG has more of the bundle. Tenure security, the confidence that rights will be respected over time, matters as much as formal title: people invest in protecting and planting trees only if they expect to benefit. Research has linked secure community rights with lower deforestation in many settings, although outcomes depend on governance and pressures.
Legal recognition of community and indigenous forest rights has spread widely: by the late 2010s, assessments by the Rights and Resources Initiative found that a growing share of forest land in low- and middle-income countries was legally owned by or designated for indigenous peoples and local communities, although most remained under state ownership. Recognition takes several forms: demarcation of indigenous territories, as in Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia; ancestral domain titles in the Philippines; community ownership of forest land in Mexico's ejidos and communities; village land forest reserves in Tanzania; customary forest rulings and social forestry permits in Indonesia; and India's 2006 Forest Rights Act, which recognises individual rights to occupied land, community rights such as grazing and collection, ownership of minor forest produce and rights to manage community forest resources through village assemblies.
Implementation has been uneven everywhere. Common problems include slow and costly demarcation and titling, rejection of claims without due process, recognition of individual plots far more often than community rights, overlapping claims by concessions, mining and protected areas, and limited support for communities after titles are issued. Where rights are secure and supported, communities have managed and marketed forest products successfully: Mexican community forest enterprises sell certified timber, villages such as Mendha-Lekha in central India have sold bamboo through their own assemblies since 2011, and indigenous territories in the Amazon show lower deforestation than comparable unprotected land. Tensions remain between rights recognition and conservation, for example over relocation from protected areas, and between communities and extractive projects, where free, prior and informed consent is increasingly demanded and sometimes upheld by courts.
For forest officers, recognised rights change the job: forests with CFR rights are managed by gram sabhas, and the forest department's role shifts towards technical support, convergence of schemes and facilitation. Working plans need to take account of recognised rights and CFR management plans. Secure tenure is also central to certification and legality (described in certification-sustainable-forest-management and the Sustainability track's sustainable-supply-chains), where respect for customary and indigenous rights and free, prior and informed consent are standard requirements.
Women and men use and manage forests differently. In much of rural South Asia and Africa, women collect most of the fuelwood, fodder, leaf litter, water and many NTFPs, while men more often control timber, cash sales and dealings with officials. Forest degradation and closure therefore affect women's workloads directly: when nearby forests are degraded or closed for regeneration, women spend more hours walking further for fuel and fodder. Headloading of fuelwood, carrying heavy bundles over long distances, is a major source of drudgery and injury. Women also hold detailed knowledge of plants, foods and medicines. Yet women have often been excluded from formal forest institutions, which were designed around male household heads, held meetings at times and places unsuitable for women, and treated women's needs as secondary.
Research by Bina Agarwal in India and Nepal found that community forest institutions with a higher proportion of women in their executive committees, particularly beyond a critical mass of roughly a quarter to a third, had better forest condition and regeneration and more equitable rules, partly because women brought knowledge, monitored rule-breaking more effectively and influenced rules on access. Women's participation in decisions, not just membership, mattered. Movements such as Chipko, in which women like Gaura Devi played leading roles, and women-only forest protection groups in Odisha and elsewhere, show women's capacity for collective forest action. Some countries' joint management guidelines require substantial representation of women, and several rights laws, as in India and parts of Africa, provide for joint titles in the names of both spouses.
Gender analysis examines differences in roles, access to and control over resources, needs and constraints, and decision-making between women and men, and how programmes will affect each. Tools include activity profiles (who does what, when and where), access and control profiles (who uses resources and who decides about them), and analysis of practical needs (such as nearer sources of fuel) and strategic interests (such as decision-making power and rights). The Harvard analytical framework and the Moser framework are widely used. Practical steps in forestry programmes include holding meetings at times and places convenient for women, ensuring women are represented in committees and as office-bearers, including species and products that women value such as fodder and fuel, providing fuel-efficient stoves and alternatives that reduce drudgery, supporting women's NTFP enterprises and self-help groups, and recruiting women forest staff. Gender also intersects with caste, class and age, so the poorest women often face the greatest exclusion.
Rapid rural appraisal (RRA) developed in the late 1970s as a quicker, cheaper alternative to long questionnaire surveys, using semi-structured interviews, observation and secondary data collected by outsiders. Participatory rural appraisal (PRA), developed and popularised in the late 1980s and 1990s, notably by Robert Chambers of the Institute of Development Studies, shifted the emphasis from outsiders extracting information to local people analysing their own situation and planning action, with outsiders as facilitators. PRA principles include handing over the stick (letting local people lead), visual and group methods that do not depend on literacy, triangulation (cross-checking information from different sources and methods), optimal ignorance (collecting only what is needed), offsetting biases (seeking out women, the poor and the less visible), and attitudes of respect and willingness to learn.
Common PRA tools include social maps, showing houses, households and social features, often used to identify poor and landless households; resource maps, showing land use, forests, water and grazing areas; transect walks across the village landscape with local people, recording soils, vegetation, land use and problems along the way; seasonal calendars of rainfall, work, food shortages, fuel and fodder availability, illness and income; daily activity profiles for women and men; timelines and trend lines of important events and changes in forests, livestock and population; Venn or chapati diagrams showing institutions and their importance and accessibility; wealth or well-being ranking, grouping households by local criteria; and pairwise and matrix ranking of problems, species or options. In pairwise ranking, each item is compared with every other item; the number of comparisons for n items is n(n - 1)/2, so ranking six tree species requires 15 comparisons. Problem trees analyse causes and effects of a core problem.
A microplan is a village-level plan, prepared with the community, for managing a forest area under joint management, community forest rights or similar arrangements, typically for five to ten years. Its preparation uses PRA tools and usually includes: a description of the village, its households and their dependence on the forest; a resource assessment of the forest area and other land; identification of needs and problems; agreed objectives; protection arrangements (patrolling, rules on grazing, fire and felling, sanctions); treatment and development works (planting, soil and water conservation, NTFP enhancement, fodder development); arrangements for harvesting and benefit sharing; institutional arrangements and roles; a budget and sources of funds; and monitoring. Microplans are meant to be approved by the community general body and the forest agency and integrated with the divisional working plan. In practice, many microplans have been prepared hastily by staff with little genuine participation, which undermines community ownership; good facilitation, time and follow-up are essential.
Conflicts over forests are common. They occur between forest departments and local communities over access, grazing, collection, encroachment and eviction; within communities, between richer and poorer households, castes, or women and men over rules and benefits; between neighbouring villages over boundaries and protection areas; between communities and industries or development projects over mining, dams, roads and plantations; between conservation and livelihoods in and around protected areas; and between people and wildlife, discussed in wildlife-management-protected-areas. Underlying causes include unclear or overlapping rights and boundaries, unequal distribution of benefits and costs, exclusion from decisions, scarcity of resources, conflicting values, poor communication, and historical grievances. Conflicts over resources can also reflect wider political and economic tensions.
Conflict can be handled in several ways, ranging from avoidance to coercion. The Thomas-Kilmann model describes five modes according to assertiveness and cooperativeness: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. Approaches to resolution include negotiation, in which parties discuss directly to reach agreement; mediation, in which a neutral third party helps parties reach their own agreement; arbitration, in which a third party hears the case and makes a decision, binding or not; and adjudication through courts. Alternative dispute resolution, outside the courts, is often faster, cheaper and better at preserving relationships. Customary institutions, such as village councils, frequently resolve local disputes and should be respected where they are fair.
Fisher and Ury's principled negotiation, from their book Getting to Yes (1981), offers widely used guidance: separate the people from the problem; focus on interests, not positions; invent options for mutual gain; and insist on using objective criteria. Knowing one's BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, clarifies when to accept or walk away. In forest conflicts, focusing on interests, such as a village's need for fuel and fodder and the department's need to protect regeneration, can reveal options such as rotational closure, cut-and-carry systems and fodder plantations that serve both.
Many forest conflicts can be prevented or reduced by clarifying and recording rights and boundaries, as under rights-recognition laws; involving communities in planning through PRA and microplanning; sharing benefits fairly and paying them on time; establishing grievance mechanisms; transparency in decisions and finances; and building trust through consistent behaviour by forest staff. Free, prior and informed consent of indigenous and local communities is required for projects affecting their lands in many standards, including forest certification, and is increasingly expected in development. Forest officers often act as mediators as well as parties in conflicts, so training in facilitation and negotiation is part of modern forestry.
Learn the components of social forestry, the history from colonial reservation to Chipko, the Green Belt Movement and the reforms of the late 1980s and 1990s; joint management institutions, benefit sharing and problems; community forestry in Nepal, Mexico, the Philippines and Tanzania; international and national recognition of indigenous rights; swidden and taungya; bundles of rights; gender evidence; PRA tools; and conflict resolution concepts. Practise PRA tools in a village if possible.
As a forest officer or NGO facilitator you organise and support joint management committees, user groups and village assemblies, facilitate PRA and microplans, process forest rights claims, support collectors' groups for non-timber products, share benefits on time, and mediate conflicts over grazing, boundaries and benefits. Judgement is needed to include women and the poorest, to avoid elite capture, and to respect customary institutions while upholding the law.
At senior level you design national or provincial policies on joint and community forest management, integrate recognised rights into management plans, coordinate forest, land and indigenous-affairs agencies, design benefit-sharing and NTFP marketing systems, and manage conflicts over protected areas and development projects. Decisions include the balance between agency control and community authority and how to support communities without capturing them.
Research questions include the outcomes of joint management, community rights and community forestry for forests and livelihoods, elite capture and equity, gender and collective action, shifting cultivation dynamics, the political economy of forest rights, and the design of institutions for commons. Rigorous research combines impact evaluation, ethnography, remote sensing and institutional analysis.
Numbers of joint management committees, user groups, rights claims and titles, and areas covered change with each report and differ between sources; approximate values are given. Benefit-sharing percentages differ by country, province and over time and are not listed. Legal texts of national forest and rights laws and decentralisation theory are in forest-policy-law-governance; grazing commons and Ostrom's principles in rangeland-management; taungya and agroforestry design in agroforestry-systems-design. Evidence on the outcomes of community forestry is mixed and context-dependent and is presented as such.
Original practice questions written to the syllabus and pattern of the exams named in each question's examTags. They are not past papers and do not reproduce any board's questions.
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