Community-based Management

Jill M. Belsky, University of Montana 
Victoria Sturtevant, Southern Oregon University

Introduction

 
Community-based management (CBM) refers to local or grassroots groups of people who have become involved in forest management on public and private lands in order to reorient forestry to better meet the needs of human communities while promoting long-term ecosystem health. Internationally, community-based management began in the 1980s as a response by forest based communities and their allies in the non-governmental sector to resist extensive logging and rainforest conversion which was destroying their source of livelihood and traditional cultures.  A movement towards community-based forest management (CBFM) emerged in North America a decade later as local residents sought a voice in public forest land management characterized by an unsustainable timber industry, intensive conflict and domination of powerful (national) interest groups, and policy gridlock.

 
Additionally, as timber companies strive to become more competitive in a global forest products industry and especially to reduce debt, they are restructuring and divesting U.S. holdings to real estate development or selling to timber investment management organization.  Community-based forestry groups are responding to the gaps left by departing industry and diminished federal agency presence in a number of ways.  These include local workforce training for forest restoration, fuel reduction and monitoring; developing markets for locally produced forest products, including non-timber forest products and biomass fuel; creating advocacy networks and lobbying for policy changes for forest workers and communities; and pooling and leveraging financial and technical resources for stewardship activities on public lands or purchase of divested timberlands for community forests.

Philosophical Basis

 
In both the North and South Americas, community-based management involves a number of challenges to the dominant ideas and practice of forestry.  These include the idea that only professionally trained foresters can and should manage forests and that forest management is solely for the production of timber and fiber.  In contrast, community based management advocates see a meaningful role for citizens in forest management decisions, practices and implementation, especially by those with long-ties to and experiential knowledge of working forests. They emphasize that local residents including those whose landscapes and livelihoods depend on forests often have a greater vested interest in long-term sustainable forest management than distant corporate owners.

 
As such, community-based management groups throughout the Americas tend to emphasize forest management for an array of values and products including but not limited to timber and wood; non-timber/wood products and values are often important goals of community management groups for food, medicines, binding materials, recreation, identity, spiritual worship and for ecosystem services and ecological resilience more generally.  Lastly, community-based groups have brought renewed attention and scholarship to the subject of common property regimes and especially to the rules, regulations and community institutions that are necessary to collectively manage forests.

Operational Challenges

 
The emphasis on “community” brings a number of definitional and operational challenges to community-based management. A key issue is that a concern for community, and in particular for community benefits, development and capacity building, distinguishes community-based management groups from other alternative processes to cooperatively and collaboratively manage and resolve forestry conflicts.  But what defines a community is neither clear nor stable.  For example, a “forest community” in the United States has been typically characterized by shared geographic residence and proximity to forests, and also by the assumption that the people who comprise a forest community share a common culture and economy tied to forests and forestry (typically Caucasian and logging-based).

 
However, communities across the United States as well as in South America may not necessarily be spatially-fixed as shifting cultivators in the tropical Americas periodically move their cultivation, homes and forest gathering/managing sites, as do mobile populations in the north involved in an array of forest product activities such as non-timber forest product harvesting, heavy machinery operators, and road building or decommissioning.  The latter include Asian and Latino ethnicities, suggesting the necessity but difficulty of organizations to meaningfully engage the participation of people and communities with vastly different cultures, occupations and socio-political characteristics and concerns.  

 
Intra-community composition and social change also pose challenges for community-based management.  Communities all over the world have always been comprised of people of different ages, genders and family lineages and allegiances. Intra-community differences are growing with demographic change, for example in the United States as the attraction of public lands for a slower pace of life, scenic views and outdoor recreation has spurred the in-migration of ex-urbanites to build first, second and even third homes in what is now called the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI). 

 
The livelihoods of these “amenity migrants” are seldom tied to the natural resource based economy.  Class and lifestyle differences, with old-timers more closely linked to natural resource based livelihoods and working landscapes, have sometimes led to the inability in a community of place to find consensus over forest management objectives and lack of interest in or ability to form a community forest management group. 

 
However even where heterogeneity has been great, the capacity for community based management has been high (and growing) in part because of existing local leadership, knowledge and skills (some brought by newcomers), and an increasing array of government and non-governmental partners assisting community based forest groups.  It has also been hastened by a mutual regard for the place in which they reside.  In many instances what began as an ad hoc group of people in a place trying to envision a “radical middle” set of values  -- often coalescing around forest and community health – has over the years become a formally organized 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission tied directly to sustainable forest use and management.

 
Across the United States, the U.S. Forest Service has embarked on partnerships with community based groups for thinning, weeding, restoring and multi-monitoring efforts on public forest lands.  In some cases the work would not have been accomplished without the added labor and efforts of such groups, given the decreasing budgets and institutional capacity of the federal agencies.

Regional Differences

 
It is important to remember that community-based management of forests occurs differently in different places.  In additions to different values and interests, variations in forest ownership, tenure and institutions importantly influence community-based forest management arrangements and durability.  Throughout the Americas, communities with custom-based, common property or communal land rights (most often indigenous cultures or First Nations though also early settlers in New England) managed “community forests” for centuries.  In these instances, a particular forest was “owned” by a collective of people who developed rules and regulations which dictated who had access or not to forests and under what conditions, including penalties imposed when such rules were not followed.  Governance and authority was locally determined and successfully practiced in many cases for thousands of years. 

 
As nation-states historically around the world sought more centralized control of forests in the hope of better rationalizing management and production, common or community-based management arrangements were not valued and safeguarded; indeed they were usually viewed as an impediment to progress and modernization.  In remote areas, rather than producing a more rationalized nation-state regulated forest governance regime, the elimination of common or community management led to creating open access regimes where ultimately no one was in charge.  In this context, community based management suggests a modified return to particular communities controlling and managing local resources (often with the nation state maintaining ownership), though with additional challenges of managing common pool resources in an economically globalized world. 

 
In the majority of places where community based management is occurring without historic precedence, its emergence represents an experiment.  While inter and intra- community differences and capabilities, lack of legal authority and other obstacles confront community-based management, the success of almost thirty years in the South and two decades in North America suggests its traction.  As markets and government evolve, the role of community based management will increase to manage and protect natural resources for their local values.

  
Suggested Further Reading

Aspen Institute. 2005. Growth rings: Communities and trees. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute.

Baker, M. and J. Kusel. 2003. Community forestry in the United States: Past Practice, Crafting the Future. Washington, D.C, Island Press.

Cheng, A.S.  et al.  2007.  Community-based Forestry Groups Objectives, Strategies, and Outcomes.  Research results from the Ford Foundation Community-based Forestry Demonstration Program.  www.warnercnr.colostate.edu/frws/cbf/

Child, B., and M.W. Lyman, eds.  2005. Natural Resources as Community assets: Lessons from Two Continents.  Madison, WI: Sand County Foundation.

Donoghue, E.M. and V.E. Sturtevant, eds.  2008.  Forest–community connections:  Implications for management, research and governance.  Washington, D.C.:  Resources for the Future. 

Gray, Gerald, J., Maia J. Enzer, and Jonathon Kusel, eds. 2001. Understanding community-based forest ecosystem management. Binghampton, N.Y.: Food Products Press.

Global Organizations

Desarrollo Forestal Comunitario  http://www.desarrolloforestal.org/

The Community-Based Natural Resource Management Network (CBNRM Net)  http://www.cbnrm.net/

Forests, Trees & People Programme & Network http://www-trees.slu.se/

Global Caucus on Community Based Forest Management http://www.wrm.org.uy/CAUCUS/leaflet.pdf

International Network of Forests and Communities   http://www.forestsandcommunities.org

National Network of Forest Practitioners   http://www.nnfp.org/

Regional Community Forestry Center for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC)  http://www.recoftc.org/

World Agroforestry Centre  http://www.worldagroforestrycentre.org/home.asp

U.S. Organizations

Communities Committee of the Seventh American Forest Congress www.communitiescommittee.org

Community Forestry Resource Center www.forestrycenter.org 

National Network of Forest Practitioners   www.nnfp.org 

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Jill M. Belsky is a professor with the Department of Society and Conservation and Bolle Center for People and Forests, College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana 

Victoria Sturtevant is a Professor with the Environmental Studies Department, Southern Oregon University

Posted 28 February 2008