Forests for a Just Future - Green Livelihoods Alliance

Community forest management can contribute to local development, while playing an important role in the protection and restoration of the world’s forests — crucial to tackle the global biodiversity and climate crises. The success of community forest management is influenced by the functioning of community-level governance arrangements. What role can the NGOs play in supporting and strengthening community-level governance?

In 2022, members of the Tropenbos International, together with RECOFTC, shared their insights about the role of NGOs in community forestry initiatives in a perspective paper in the journal Tropical Conservation Science. They now publish the findings of this paper in an interactive format, adding their own experiences and lessons in the form of short case studies.

Note: the publication is an interactive PDF for desktop. Here you can download a version for mobile devices.
 

This annual review presents examples of our achievements in 2022. They illustrate the wide variety of context-specific solutions that TBI members and partners work on. The stories show how Indigenous peoples and local communities, including youth, now have stronger rights to use and manage the forests they depend on, and the capacity to exercise those rights. They show how multistakeholder platforms have become vibrant places for dialogue among landscape actors, and how local governments’ regulations and policies regarding the use of forests and trees have been improved. The stories also demonstrate how best practices are spreading within and between landscapes, and how tangible changes in land use are becoming apparent on the ground. 

In this paper the authors argue that, rather than using preconceived notions of good governance and predefined community forestry models, NGOs need to assist communities with strengthening and adapting local governance structures, so they are better equipped to deal with opportunities and challenges associated with ongoing commercialization and pressures from external actors. This means that NGO practitioners must act as facilitators of community-level discussions, negotiations, and decision-making, and of interactions with external actors.

For NGOs to play this role effectively, they need to engage in long-term commitments with communities. Next to that, there is a need to invest in the training of practitioners, so they not only have the necessary technical and management skills, but also the skills to facilitate highly complex and dynamic social processes. Only then will community forestry initiatives contribute to local agency and ownership, as key requirements for successful community forestry in the long term.

This perpective paper is the result of a initiative of TBI in collaboration with RECOFTC, where a group of practitioners working on community forestry in Bolivia, Colombia, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Nepal and the Philippines have been exchanging experiences to reflect on the role of NGOs in community forestry initiatives.

The formalization of community forest tenure rights is expected to promote sustainable community forest management, and is seen as a way to combine objectives related to environmental conservation, livelihood improvement, and local self-determination. However, the formalization of forest tenure rights by itself, does not automatically result in the intended impacts. There is a need to better understand the conditions under which communities are able to use these rights to achieve positive outcomes across multiple dimensions. We formulated a simple theory of change that underlies the formalization of community forest tenure rights, and used it to assess the outcomes, bottlenecks and enabling conditions of community forest tenure models across the forested tropics. Based on this analysis, we identified ten conditions that need to be in place for community forest tenure rights formalization to achieve the intended impacts. The theory of change and associated conditions form a generic conceptual framework that can be used to inform policy and practice of actors supporting community forest tenure rights, including civil society organizations and government agencies.

As part of a multi-country review of community forest rights, Tropenbos DR Congo conducted a review of the CFCL model in DR Congo. The study meant to find out the extent to which CFCLs have had the desired outcomes in terms of rural development, and to identify the main barriers, as well as the conditions for success (in terms of improvements to livelihoods, self-determination and forest conservation).

This briefing paper gives key recommendations for practitioners related to the need of strong community-based enforcement institutions, formal rights over the forests, and good relationships with local government agencies in order to implement successful conservation and forest management initiatives. Twelve initiatives of communities in the northern Peruvian Amazon that voluntarily manage their forests, independent of government policies and external finance were studied.