Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Defining concepts and spaces for the re-emergence of community forestry
- 2 Putting community forestry into place: implementation and conflict
- 3 Keeping New England's forests common
- 4 Experiments and false starts: Ontario's community forestry experience
- 5 A “watershed” case for community forestry in British Columbia's interior: the Creston Valley Forest Corporation
- 6 Contested forests and transition in two Gulf Island communities
- 7 The southwestern United States: community forestry as governance
- 8 Community access and the culture of stewardship in Finland and Sweden
- 9 Community forestry: a way forward
- Index
- References
1 - Defining concepts and spaces for the re-emergence of community forestry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Defining concepts and spaces for the re-emergence of community forestry
- 2 Putting community forestry into place: implementation and conflict
- 3 Keeping New England's forests common
- 4 Experiments and false starts: Ontario's community forestry experience
- 5 A “watershed” case for community forestry in British Columbia's interior: the Creston Valley Forest Corporation
- 6 Contested forests and transition in two Gulf Island communities
- 7 The southwestern United States: community forestry as governance
- 8 Community access and the culture of stewardship in Finland and Sweden
- 9 Community forestry: a way forward
- Index
- References
Summary
INTRODUCTION
There is no shortage of places in the world where forests and their resources are subject to acrimonious, even fierce, conflicts. Across a range of jurisdictions, community forestry is one of the solutions being promoted. Definitions of community forestry contain the common perspective that local control of local natural resources helps to produce multiple benefits for local communities. Ideally, community forestry is different from conventional forest management and planning approaches. Community-based environmental resource management and planning seeks to achieve sustainability, fairness, and efficiency in relation to tenure arrangements, stakeholder representation, and the use of all available forms of knowledge in decision-making to support ecologically sustainable practice and mitigate conflict. In some instances, the potential for success of community forestry has been diminished by excessive expectations. However, defining a role for communities in managing local forests is a challenge for government agencies, forestry professionals, firms and communities themselves. The approach holds promise, but there are a range of dynamic factors and contextual conditions that influence the impact and efficacy of community forestry. This book provides a critical look at community forestry in North America and Northern Europe, one that seeks a more incisive look at the concept, its promise and its limitations.
COMMUNITIES AND FORESTS
Community forestry is neither a new concept nor a new practice. It represents a traditional and longstanding approach to managing human interactions with forest lands and resources, common in developing regions and among the indigenous societies of developed regions (Poffenberger 1990; Mallik and Rahman 1994; Baker and Kusel 2003; Menzies 2004). Over about the past 150 years, there has been a slow and sporadic adoption of community forestry in North America, typically as an alternative to large-scale industrial and state-run forest management. While community interests often have had to compete with industrial interests and conventional forms of western forestry, a blend of industrial and ecoforestry methods is used in community forests in developed countries (Duinker and Pulkki 1998; Beckley 1998; Krogman and Beckley 2002; Teitelbaum et al. 2006; Bullock et al. 2009). Evidently discord among conventional industrial and community-based approaches has more to do with contrasting principles and vested interests than with actual preferences for forestry practices.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Community ForestryLocal Values, Conflict and Forest Governance, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012