The desire for research to be policy relevant has caused many social science studies to have “engineering” dimensions. With respect to the engineering of property rights, economic approaches indicate that we require knowledge regarding the makeup of current property rights structures, how changes to current structures affect the use and management of natural resources, and how property rights have evolved.

Community forestry has transformed over the past 25 years from being an experimental means of providing wood-fuel for the rural poor to a community-led movement demanding reform of the forestry sector. International networks to promote community forestry, which emerged at very different moments in this history with different visions, goals, targets and participants, have played a key role in this transformation.

What policies should be adopted regarding enclave populations in national parks and other protected areas and how should the policies be implemented? These questions are important for protected areas throughout the world. Andrew P. Vayda and Ahmad Sahur report here on socio-economic and historical research that they conducted in the rapidly industrialising Indonesian province of East Kalimantan to help deal with such questions.

CIFOR facilitated 27 communities in the Upper Malinau watershed to develop agreements about their village boundaries and map them through participatory methods. Decentralization reforms created new values of forest resources and uncertainties that increased conflict over local resources. The authors report on the nature of these conflicts, the stability of agreements and the factors affecting how agreements were reached.

Community forestry has transformed over the past 25 years from being an experimental means of providing wood-fuel for the rural poor to a community-led movement demanding reform of the forestry sector. International networks to promote community forestry, which emerged at very different moments in this history with different visions, goals, targets and participants, have played a key role in this transformation.

The study was based on initial research during 2000 and 2002 in the districts of Kapuas, Central Kalimantan, supplemented with interviews with policy makers in Jakarta during July-August 2001. This paper considers how the decentralization process involves legal and institutional changes that encompass a wide arrary of actors, institutions and levels of government. It raises issues of coordination, negotiation and conflict across multiple levels and jurisdictions.

This book focuses primarily on changes that have taken place in the Malinau area in East Kalimantan in recent years. The Punan Malinau, who inhabit the area, are former nomads who subsist on a wide range of forest-oriented activities, including swidden agriculture, hunting and the collection of and trade in forest products. During the past ten years, the arrival of a growing number of powerful outsiders, including NGO's, timber and mining companies, has contributed to increasing competition for land and for various new sources of income.

Governments around the world increasingly seek to manage their forests with the collaboration of the people living nearby. Ministries of forestry or their equivalents usually do this by offering local people access to selected forest products or forest land, income from forest resources, or opportunities for communicating with government forestry officials. In return, the agency obliges local people to cooperate in managing the forests around them by protecting existing forest or by planting trees.