Strengthening community forest network

General

Introduction Community-based management of land and forest land is based on traditional knowledge, experience and aspiration of community, aiming to enhance the capacity and experience sharing between the community and stakeholders for sustainable natural resource management, livelihood improvement and traditional cultural value conservation of forest-associated community. However, community forest has not been encouraged to develop because of legal framework lacking. Besides, the community has not been recognized as a legal entity. They have not been assigned natural forest as production forest in accordance with Land Law 2013# These are barriers against the forest ownership of community that lives closely with forest for thousands of years. In order to solve the mentioned inadequacies, Oxfam has supported Ma Lieng and Uyen Phong community with project #Sustainable forest management through strengthening tradition institutions in the management of community land and forest of Ma Lieng community in Giang Man Mountain, Tuyen Hoa district, Quang Binh province#. The project has gained a number of achievements: Advising the procedure of assigning forest land management rights with the total area of 802.19 ha for 04 communities. The communities have been assigned with certificates of land use right for 50 years; advising the development of forest management regulations based on cultural identity and traditions of Ma Lieng community;establishing a network of community forest management in central region including Ma Lieng, Khua, Sach, Kinh, Co Tu, Van Kieu community so that Ma Lieng people have opportunities to learn and share experience with other communities about community forest management; promoting stakeholders like the People#s Committee of Tuyen Hoa district to issue decisions on community forest management and integrate the community forest management into socio-economic program of the district. Besides, through models of community forest management, policy lessons are summarized, contributing to the revised Land Law 2013 and a number of legal documents relating to state-run agricultural farms and forestry farms innovation. However, the project has only assigned the people with forest land managementrights and created basic legal framework. It is necessary to continue the community consultancy, institutionalize documents on managing and extracting the forests, ensuring a legal framework for people to manage and protect the forests. On the basis of the undertaken activities, the project should continue systematizing and consolidating the information and practical lessons for policy advocacy for system of legal documents that will be amended and issued.