Community Forestry and Development

Forests and forestry were first seriously considered as a vehicle to reach development objectives in the 1970s, leading to the recognition of community forestry as a focal point for international development cooperation. The exact opportunities for cooperation, and how to realize them, have changed as international development thinking has evolved. In recent decades, traditional academic analyses of communal forestry and development practices have been complemented by trends that focus on specific aspects of forests and local people, including non-timber forest products, forest devolution, decentralization, and collaborative management. The perceived role of community forestry in development cooperation, as well as the type of assistance that is needed and provided, continues to evolve with changing international development agendas, priorities, and objectives.


Introduction
Community forestry, or communal forest management (CFM), refers to community practices that are traditionally related to forests. The term has been part of development experts' vocabulary since the 1970s. Since then, it has been widely recognized that forests and trees play an important role in the subsistence activities of rural communities and that supporting CFM contributes to rural community development.
In recent years, CFM has received renewed attention from international donors and development agencies, national governments and their forestry agencies, and conservation NGOs. This renewed attention, like the attention CFM has received in recent decades, is driven by two main objectives. First, it is widely accepted that supporting CFM provides benefits that go directly to improving the well being of the practicing communities. Second, it is assumed that supporting CFM contributes to the conservation of forests, thereby assuring various ecosystem services that may not be directly consumed, but are important to rural communities. In the latter case, strengthening CFM positively impacts the practicing communities themselves and downriver residents who benefit from the regulating effects of communally managed forests. The same holds true for people beyond the watersheds in which CFM is practiced, individuals who benefit from the carbon sequestration, conservation of biodiversity, or preservation of scenic values provided by CFM.
As awareness has grown that CFM contributes to rural community development This paper provides an historical overview and explores the renewed interest in CFM observed over the last few years. We assume CFM is a key component of development cooperation programs found in many national and international agencies. We try on the one hand to capture the growth of CFM as a development cooperation activity, and on the other hand, to locate CFM within the trends and ideals that have guided development cooperation over the last 40 years. To achieve our objectives, section two will review the terminology used in the CFM literature.
A discussion of CFM requires clarification of key concepts and definitions because CFM and related terminology is often used in a variety of different contexts. The CFM concept has changed since the 1970s, when it was first introduced by Community Forestry and Development 181 development agencies and social forestry research centers. The exact meaning of CFM and related terminology influences how forestry development cooperation projects and research efforts are planned and implemented. It also has an important impact on the discussion of policies and legal matters related to CFM. Section three reflects on the growth of CFM as a development cooperation strategy and clarifies how communal forestry has appeared as a term, idea, and practice of development cooperation since the 1970s. Section four discusses how development models that have dominated international development cooperation since the 1980s coincide with the logic behind CFM as a development cooperation strategy. Section five summarizes the new emphasis given to CFM in the 1980s and 1990s. We conclude with section six.

Defining Community Forestry
The term "communal forest management" is frequently used in many different contexts; as a result, it does not have the same meaning for all those who use it.
Unfortunately, many forestry and development experts fail to reach a clear consensus on the meaning of CFM, resulting in development cooperation projects that adopt mistaken assumptions, leading to poorly directed efforts that do not have the desired impact.
The term "community forestry" was first introduced by the FAO in 1970 when it launched the "Forestry for Communal Development" program (Wiersum, 1999).
The program's objectives were to ensure the provision of firewood and other forest products that rural populations in poor tropical countries depend on for subsistence activities or sell to generate income. In his analysis, however, Wiersum proposes the term "social forestry" to describe activities that specifically focus on development assistance, as related to communal forestry. He argues that to derive coherent definitions of "community forestry" and "social forestry," one must make a distinction between the key players and their activities. Considering these elements, he proposes that communal forest management encompasses forest management activities undertaken by communities as part of a comprehensive set of subsistence activities.
Social forestry encompasses the strategies of the professional development assistance sector to promote communal forest management in an effort to improve the condition of local populations (Wiersum, 1999, p.81). The distinction proposed by Wiersum has not been widely adopted. To mention it here, however, underscores the broad meaning of the term "communal forest management," as applied by professional foresters and CFM experts.
The term "community," as applied to the communal forest management concept, must be clearly defined. Rural settlers who benefit from tropical forests can be categorized into many groups. In Latin America, they include not only indigenous forest communities such as the Ribereños in Peru, Caboclos in Brazil, and other quasi-ethnic groups (c.s. Chibnik, 1991), but also settlers who recently migrated to forest regions, including those from the Andean highlands. In the Kalimantan provinces of Indonesia, they include indigenous Dayak groups, as well as people who have migrated to the region from other islands (e.g., Mayer, 1996). In Vietnam, they include indigenous mountain groups and Kin people who have migrated from the lowlands (Tran Van Con, 2006). The following attributes help to define various groups practicing CFM: (1) the type of benefits they obtain from forests, (2) their purpose for using forests, (3) their relation with markets and the political-legal and regulatory frameworks that grant different rights to each group, and (4) the level of internal organization and the type of formal and non-formal property rights they exercise over forests and forestlands.
Although it would make sense to systematically categorize the forest management practices and attributes of the different groups that practice CFM, the forest management practices of all these groups can cumulatively be considered communal forest management because supporting these practices can contribute to development objectives. There is no doubt, however, that assistance provided by support organizations must be adapted to each group's specific needs and circumstances.
An alternative approach to developing a definition of communal forest management is to explicitly exclude forest activities that are not part of CFM. In our definition, CFM excludes forest activities conducted by corporations or similar forestland held under some common property, or used as a common pool resource.
In the cases we consider, CFM is often linked to various types of formally or informally held property (e.g., customary or temporary rights that allow individuals or families exclusive access to forests, as well as rights shared by entire communities).
The second part of communal forest management, forest management, refers to a wide range of forest types and a variety of uses within these forests (Wiersum, 1999, p.82). In this context, Wiersum defines management as a process of making and implementing decisions that are related to forest resources (Ibid.). As the section below suggests, from about 1980 onward, development cooperation related to CFM has focused on natural forests. Previous to this date, CFM was mainly concerned with communal management practices of non-forest tree vegetation.
Many of the activities previously linked with CFM have, in later years, been grouped as agroforesty. The management of plantations by the groups or communities described earlier in this section generally falls outside the scope of CFM.
We assert that forest management becomes communal when the activity is of a collective nature; we interpret "collective" in a broad sense. Collective implies that a communal forest territory is recognized and defended in such a way that access is granted only to community members or third parties who have been granted permission by the community.
In summary, it is important to distinguish between two different activities: (1) forest management activities carried out by rural communities and (2) programs that assist groups who engage in some kind of forest management. In practice, both are often called CFM, but it is important to make a distinction between these activities.
Communal forest management has become a generalized term among forestry, conservation, and rural development specialists. Thus, it is often necessary to provide a clear definition of the type and specific aspects of CFM to be discussed before proceeding with an assumed understanding of the term.

Emergence of CFM Development Cooperation
The definition of communal forest management has much to do with its evolution as a mechanism that development cooperation agencies have increasingly used to provide development assistance to rural communities. German foresters first proposed the concept of "sustainability" in the 18 th Century (Wiersum, 1999, p.40;see Neumann, 2006 for a different interpretation). Foresters have recognized the importance of forests for many sectors of society, including agricultural communities, long before the advent of international development cooperation. In the United States, for example, forest policies mandated that state agencies provide assistance to rural communities as early as the 1930s (Wiersum, 1999). In 19 th Century Switzerland, different parties held discussions to determine whether communities had priority to benefit from common use forest reserves (Colfer and Capistrano, 2005).
Throughout the 19 th and into the early 20 th Centuries, European countries controlled a vast majority of tropical forest areas in their Asian and African colonies.
The interest in forest resources, and efforts to administrate and manage them, increased as forest sciences advanced through forestry research in Europe (Potter, 2004). Although some colonial governments considered aboriginal forest uses, most set priorities according to the economic interests of their own countries. Wiersum (1999) mentions some cases where the colonial forest agencies considered and implemented CFM policies; however, these policies were always in combination with a forest management program that prioritized economic income of the national government. These policies often severely restricted aboriginal forest use and colonial governments frequently relocated people to ensure exclusive forest use (Potter, 2004;Bradley, 2006).
Many of the forest policies and laws governing ownership of forestlands under postcolonial governments were carried over from the old colonial regimes. This phenomenon, however, is not because postcolonial governments maintained the same policies and practices of their predecessors. Instead, the dominant international development theories of the post-World War II period -which coincided with a worldwide decolonization period -held that the economic growth of a country required growth of the industrial sector. Later, national economic development theories argued that economic growth should be based on an expansion of the commercial agricultural sector, emphasizing export production. It was commonly thought that investments in forest industries, and the expansion of forestry as a commercial activity, would lead to an increase in the export of raw timber or finished wood products. According to these theories, investments and commercial expansion of the wood sector would benefit broad sectors of society (Wiersum, 1999;Arnold, 1991Arnold, , 2001, including the rural poor. The strengthening of the agricultural and forestry sectors implied that post-colonial governments should maintain control over a nation's forest resource.
Increasing awareness that focusing solely on economic growth does not automatically lead to improvements for the rural poor resulted in a shift toward development strategies aimed at improving the welfare of national economies, while pursuing strategies based in development cooperation. The new approach introduced integrated development aimed at addressing the basic needs of marginalized groups without considering the wider economy of the entire country.
This change in international development thinking explains the projects and programs geared towards CFM that became central components of donor programs, beginning in the 1970s (Arnold, 1991). The primary objective of these projects and programs was to address the basic needs of the rural poor. These projects and programs reflected, at least partly, new ideas about the most appropriate strategies for the development of low GDP countries. The development assistance provided to CFM focused on reforestation of degraded forestlands to reduce the negative effects of forest clearing and the resulting timber and firewood shortage. The programs of that era focused on ensuring a supply of forest products for household consumption and providing alternative options to existing local agricultural practices that were focused on market production to generate income (Arnold, 1991(Arnold, , 2001. In reality, the governments of countries like South Korea, Nepal, India, Tanzania (Arnold, 2001), China (Chockalingam et al., 2006a), the Philippines (Chokkalingam et al., 2006b), and Vietnam (de Jong et al., 2006) had programs in place since the 1950s and 1960s to address deforestation and declining forest product supply.
These countries initiated wide-scale reforestation programs that involved popular participation, but were not concerned with the needs of rural populations.
Arnold (2001) observes that CFM support efforts during the 1970s had little success. The firewood crisis -one of the main motivations to provide development support to CFM -was not caused by a shortage of wood, rather high production costs and limited availability of manual labor. High costs and labor shortages also help explain why these CFM programs were not successful.

Development Models and Community Forestry
The previous section pointed out links between international development theories of the 1950s and 1960s and CFM-focused development cooperation.
International development theories have continued to evolve since the 1960s. It is, therefore, relevant to evaluate the link between more recent dominant development models and CFM, once again considering actual CFM practices and development cooperation that addresses CFM. Adams (2001) and Neumann (2006)  interest in placing the management of natural resources, including forests, in the hands of local communities seen in the 1970s and 1980s (Balee, 1984;Bergman, 1974;Casanova, 1975;Denevan et al., 1984;Padoch et al., 1985, Parker et al., 1983) directly relates to development populism. Nevertheless, CFM continued to be promoted through the types of projects and programs described in the previous section. Agroforestery was also increasingly supported by newly established agencies like ICRAF and agricultural universities around the world during this period of time. Development populism has been an important factor in shaping the evolution of CFM.
On the other side, CFM as a development cooperation strategy did not expand much during the height of the development populism years. This is, at least partly, a result of the resistance of forestry agencies in many countries that continued to support corporate forestry. Another important reason is that the neoliberal model replaced the development populism model from the 1980s onward. Neoliberalism became the central doctrine in economic policy of most countries with emerging economies and dominated international development cooperation (Neumann, 2006).
Neoliberalism called for an end to state control and the rise of market forces as the driving force of international development. Although this model promoted corporate commercial forestry above all, it had the side effect of placing development cooperation that focused on rural communities in the hands of NGOs (Neumann, 2006), thereby reducing the state's responsibility for rural development.
The neoliberal model has had other positive impacts for CFM because it largely supports yielding state property rights to private property holders. Additionally, the neoliberalism of the 1980s, and its continuation to the present, has contributed to a process of decentralization that has become a worldwide trend, even in countries with tropical forests. The effect of decentralization on the forest sector has been complex, but in several cases it has had positive effects on CFM (Larson et al., 2006). In some instances (see Ruiz, 2004Ruiz, , 2005 for an example from Bolivia), governments promoted new legislation to offset the negative effects of neoliberal economic policies, even among populations living in forested regions. As Bernstein  (Larson et al., 2006).
The shift towards the neoliberal development model, and subsequent withdrawal of state support for CFM, contributed to a wave of organizations and projects that support CFM because of its perceived contribution to the conservation of tropical forests and their biodiversity. One important strategy to achieve both rural development and forest conservation was through the commercialization of nontimber forest products (NTFP) and the so-called integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs, see below). The popularity of neoliberalism coincided with growing international concern about the conversion of tropical forests in the second half of the 1980s. Much advertisement and popular support fed this concern, including support from artists and musicians who associated with tribal people from tropical forest regions to battle for a common cause, to save tropical forests for the sake of their inhabitants and for the good of the world community.
The concern for tropical forests was shared by international development cooperation agencies that enthusiastically financed projects that had both development and conservation goals. Although the resulting projects that attempted to support forest conservation through commercialization of NTFP and ICDPs were generally unsuccessful, projects of such nature continued into the 1990s. Critics have repeatedly questioned the sincerity of forest conservationists in their efforts to support rural development objectives (e.g., Dove, 1994;Browder, 1992). The forest sector does not yet play prominently in poverty reduction strategies (Oksanen et al., 2003). CFM experts believe many within the forest sector fail to recognize the sector's potential to support poverty reduction strategies, especially through CFM (Ibid.). On the other hand, it can be argued that the emergent understanding of poverty as a multi-dimensional condition has, until recently, been insufficiently considered in the objectives of many CFM assistance efforts.
The strongest criticism of international development cooperation comes from a number of authors who discuss the sector within a critique of the politics that drive international development. In our view, development cooperation is never free of influence from (and it may sometimes be dominated by) economic and political ideologies and values. Development cooperation, as a result, represents interests, be they direct economic interests or more subtle political and ideological interests, of those who provide development assistance or the means for development assistance. How much does this jeopardize the true interests of CFM participants? More specifically, how much do CFM assistance programs help local elite, or more influential groups, maintain control over others within their own political sphere?
These questions are difficult to answer and it may not be sufficient to rely on answers given by CFM communities. According to Tsing (1999), CFM communities frequently support and adopt the ideology of supporting agencies. The methods used by representatives of the development cooperation establishment -for example, to define the needs and aspirations of CFM communities -are often only partially helpful, or even misleading, because they seldom recognize local cultures' capacity for rational decision making. Thus, they lack vital input from the communities they intend to serve (Gasché et al., 2006).
The underlying assumption of most criticism directed at CFM is that CFM participants have ulterior motives that involve economic gain. These ulterior motives must, in one way or another, be positioned both socially and politically within the dominant society's culture. Specialists who are professionally aware of and interested in CFM share these assumptions, allowing for the development of common agendas, even though economic gain may not be an overtly intentional objective. There are, of course, groups with different objectives that do not include economic gain or adapting their cultural and social structures to interface with the outside world. Members of these groups also have necessities related to forest resources, but little detailed analysis has been completed to determine what CFM would mean for such groups, whether there is an opportunity to provide such assistance, or what form such assistance would take.

Trends in Communal Forest Management Assistance
There are a number of clear trends in debates surrounding CFM and related development assistance. This section summarizes six major trends observed from the 1980s until the present. Three of these trends emphasize actual forest management and related increases in economic income, of which two include a changing focus to primary forest management and the marketing of NTFP. These two trends are very much a product of the global concern for tropical forest conversion and reflect efforts to address tropical deforestation. The third and more recent trend focuses on communal forest companies that support organization at the community level. Such organization is thought to more effectively carry out CFM and engage with regional, national, and international markets (Stoian and Donovan, 2007). Three other trends relate specifically to political aspects of CFM and include changing forest property rights (often towards regimes of common property), the decentralization of forest governance, and collaborative forest management. In this section, we comment on some of these trends.
As previously discussed, before the 1980s international development cooperation agencies that addressed CFM focused mainly on reforestation of deforested areas and tree production in agricultural lands. In the 1980s, these agencies refocused their attention toward communities and primary forests. The rehabilitation of degraded forestlands, the production of trees on agricultural lands, and fast growing tree plantations, were no longer considered to be within the realm of CFM. They became a new specialization identified as forest rehabilitation, agroforestry, and more recently plantation forestry outgrower schemes, or community-company forest plantation partnerships (Calderon and Nawir, 2006;Nawir and Santoso, 2005). The shift toward focusing on primary forests in CFM research and development cooperation coincided with worldwide concern for tropical deforestation in the 1990s and awareness that rural settlers occupied significant portions of tropical forests, and refused to abandon those forests to commercial interests. The latter also triggered intensified academic interest in primary forest-based CFM, beginning in the early 1980s.

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The concept of NTFP emerged in the late 1980s, focusing on opportunities provided by a broad array of forest products that could theoretically generate local income while simultaneously achieving forest conservation objectives. Production of NTFP would help stop forest conversion because the economic benefits from NTFP surpass the benefits derived from other alternative uses, such as timber extraction or conversion for cattle and crops. This trend also built on the fact that NTFP play an important role in the economic strategies of forest settlers. Interest in NTFP itself, however, was not new. Non-timber products were among the first from tropical forests to be traded on the international market. Colonial forestry experts have had an interest in what were previously called "minor or secondary forest products" since the 19 th Century (Belcher, 2003). Even though this suggests nontimber products played a minor role, tropical timber extraction for international markets did not begin until the 1950s in countries like the Philippines. Colonial tropical forest experts have produced a sizeable body of literature on the subject (e.g., Burkill, 1955;Kirtikar and Basu, 1935;Watt, 1889).
Renewed interest in NTFP since the late 1980s has much to do with CFM research and development assistance changing focus toward primary forests. Since the perception arose that NTFP could contribute to the conservation of tropical forests, much attention, mainly driven by conservation interests, has been given to NTFP. Important sectors of international development cooperation adopted the same environmental conservation agenda, pursuing a sustainable development agenda that attempted to reconcile the objectives of socioeconomic development with those of environmental conservation. Homma (1992), one of the leading scholars studying this trend, called it "neo-extractivism." The NTFP boom continued through numerous donor-sponsored initiatives to promote the extraction and commercialization of NTFP, frequently identified as integrated conservation and development projects. These projects increased substantially in tropical forest regions, but they encountered difficulties in reaching their objectives (Wells et al., 1992;Wolmer, 2004 Since the end of the 1980s, a number of publications have appeared (e.g., Poffenberger, 1990;Peluso, 1992) (Chokkalingam et al., 2006b). Nevertheless, some critics (e.g., Edmunds and Wollenberg, 2003) observed that much of the forestland handed over to communities contained forests of low productivity or of no significant commercial value.
Property rights reform had two important consequences for CFM. During the 1990s, significant resources were dedicated to demarcating and titling indigenous lands. Significant investments were also made to promote common property management regimes for tropical forests (Arnold, 2001). Toward the end of the 1990s, common property forest management had the image of a universal solution to the problems of poverty and related resource degradation. Critics, however, questioned the faith put in common property tropical forest management (Campbell et al., 2001). Arguments in favor include: (1) simpler administrative procedures for putting forestland into shared ownership, as compared to individual ownership, (2) a perceived equitable sharing of forest benefits, and (3) abstaining from resource degrading exploitation according to the "tragedy of the commons" syndrome. More recent assessments (e.g., Campbell et al., 2001) suggest that common property regimes do not necessarily contribute to sustainable use, largely because the relative value of the forest does not justify the necessary investment in communal regulating mechanisms and related monitoring. Even though enthusiasm for common property has diminished since its peak in the 1990s, it continues to be of interest to development cooperation experts.
As forestland property rights have changed in the 1990s, a new initiative identified as collaborative forest management, or adaptive collaborative forest management (e.g., Fisher, 1995;Buck et al., 2001;Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001;Colfer, 2005), has emerged. Collaborative forest management, in its basic form, implies close coordination and collaboration between local users of tropical forests (i.e., communities practicing CFM) and agencies that have technical and administrative responsibilities to manage forests for the public good. In most cases these are state agencies, often in collaboration with environmental NGOs, charged with the task of representing the common interests of society as a whole, while sharing forest management responsibilities with forest communities. Adaptive collaborative management extends the concept of collaborative management to include a social learning component that characterizes the evolving trend of collaborative management (e.g., Wollenberg et al., 2007).
Most collaborative forest management systems include regulations and rules that define the conditions under which communities can use and benefit from forests.
Communities participating in CFM and professionals from regulating agencies seek joint implementation of management objectives that ensure the interests of all those who consume goods and services from forests are equally represented. These interests may include harvested forest products, ecosystem services, the conservation of biodiversity, or scenic and spiritual values. Collaborative forest management is not a simple matter, much more difficult in practice than in theory. The interactions between regulating and administrative agencies, communities, and private interests, as in the case of property rights, are often characterized by conflict and friction (e.g., Ruiz, 2005).
In summary, the trends described here reflect differing approaches to development cooperation in support of CFM. Generally speaking, these approaches can be grouped into income-generating, property rights, and forest management strategies. The identification of NTFP as a potential market trend, along with the shift toward communal timber harvesting seen since 2000, are strategies to generate income for communities practicing CFM. Efforts to give communities formal property rights over forestlands guaranteed the basic conditions needed to allow the continued success of CFM practices. The trend toward adaptive collaborative forest management suggests a more comprehensive network of support for the implementation of CFM. In addition to addressing the regulatory and technical aspects of forest management, adaptive collaborative forest management also provides legal security and product development and marketing for CFM projects, while considering social learning among diverse stakeholders.
Trends such as promoting the production and trade of NTFP, changes in property rights, common property regimes, and collaborative forest management show that the development assistance provided to CFM has split into separate and specialized themes that address different aspects of CFM.

Conclusion
Our paper has yet to explain why there is increased interest in CFM among forestry and rural development experts, as well as others. CFM has always been subject to waxing and waning interest from the development cooperation sector.
Thus, one may wonder if the latest boost in interest comes from new insights into the potential of CFM, or that new development cooperation priorities make CFM a more appropriate focus. Perhaps other circumstances explain the recent trend as well.
To some extent, the observed trend is a product of changes that have taken place over the last decade, especially concerning forestland property rights. As a result, CFM, and the nature of assistance to communities practicing CFM, has changed.
Nowadays, the commodities that in many cases are the focus of CFM development assistance have shifted from innocuous NTFP (for which markets and marketable products had to be established) to high value timber (where it still is available), Brazil nuts, eagle wood, rattan, or sandalwood. Thus, CFM assistance focuses on preparing forest management plans for timber production and establishing communal enterprises to market forest products.
As we have demonstrated, CFM has evolved through a non-linear series of events to reach its current state of development. Future trends inside and outside the forest sector will likely continue to shape its development in the years to come.
Contemporary CFM is very much rooted in the activities of local people, as well as outside assistance and changes brought about by external economic, political, and social forces. Although our analysis may not provide any direct practical contribution for CFM development practitioners, we hope it gives some insight into the trajectory of CFM development assistance and the fragile bond that holds the two together. As the trajectory of CFM development assistance changes, so too will the on-the-ground reality for CFM practitioners. One can only hope that by the time outside agencies shift their focus to other areas, many communities practicing CFM worldwide will have gained sufficient experience and advanced their skills far enough to carry on with limited support, likely from regional advisors.