Local communities and state forest actors, such as Protection Forest Management Boards (PFMBs), State Forest Companies (SFCs), play equally important roles in forest resource management. Yet local communities have limited legal rights. This is one reason that leads to a lack of forest ownership for local communities. In order to support local communities to effectively engage in sustainable forest management and livelihood development, a fuller set of rights should be legally given to them.

Insight: Notes from the Field is a response to this need, and with this publication, we aim to give practitioners a forum to share field level cases and lessons in Community Forestry (CF) or Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM).  In this edition of Notes from the Field, there are inspirational stories on Community Forestry in Thailand, development of Village Forest Councils in India, experiences on Public Hearing and Public Auditing in community user groups in Nepal, and how to improve buffer zone co-management in protected areas of Vietnam.

This literature study, conducted under a collaborative framework between NAFRI and RECOFTC, was developed to analyze the status of community contribution to forest resource management in Lao PDR and the modes and extent that communities are or have been involved in the different applied models. The report aims to give an overview of community based forest initiatives up to now, analyze lessons, challenges and opportunities and give guidance for future work.

An increasing body of evidence shows that forest governance and tenure reforms are central to mitigating a number of problems related to forests, and seriously affect forest-dependent people. On this backdrop, this assessment of South Asian forest tenure systems was initiated to provide a greater understanding of the tenure trends and status in the region that can potentially inform the policy process. This is the synthesis report of forest tenure assessments prepared by country consultants in six countries in South Asia: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, China and Pakistan.

What do opportunity costs mean in the context of REDD+ and what are the implications for local communities? Farmers intuitively know the importance of opportunity costs. To tackle deforestation in a socially equitable way, we must consider what the drivers of deforestation are and what incentives and livelihood opportunities accompany them.

Under present and foreseeable economic and social trends in the Asia-Pacific region, can we achieve sustainable forest management and better realize the potential of forests and forestry to contribute to improved human well-being? 

Community forestry supports local level climate change adaptation by enhancing resilience in multiple ways: supporting livelihoods and income, increasing food security, leveraging social capital and knowledge, reducing disaster risks and regulating microclimates. However, adaptation planning has, by and large, not included community forestry as a viable climate change adaptation tool.

Myanmar is one of the most biologically diverse and ecologically productive nations on Earth. Its forests support the livelihoods of more than 36 million people, while the forestry sector employs more than

500,000 people and is one of seven sectors promoted under Myanmar’s National Export Strategy. Yet, after decades of unsustainable exploitation, driven by arbitrary revenue targets, mismanagement, illegal logging and, more recently, large-scale conversion to agricultural crops, Myanmar’s forests are badly damaged.

In many Asian countries, communities and smallholders are faced with barriers to exercising their tenure rights and to making a living from selling timber and other forest products. This study puts forward an effort to respond to the issue of restrictions, in the form of regulatory barriers, in the pursuit of sustainable forest management.

In December 2004, the passing of the Forest Protection and Development Law (FPDL) legally recognized community forest management (CFM) in Vietnam for the first time. Despite this step, skepticism remains about whether CFM can work in practice and to what extent legal recognition contributes to effective forest protection and management.

During 2008, in response to these concerns, the Forest Governance Learning Group (FGLG) visited 25 villages to learn from field implementation of CFM in seven provinces.

Read RECOFTC’s digital annual report, “Building resilience through community forestry.” This report covers the period October 2017 to September 2019.