Agents or stewards in community forestry enterprises? Lessons from the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala

Published Date
March 2016, Vol.52:255–265, doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.12.016

Author 

Dora Carias Vega ^,

Rodney J. Keenan

School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne, 221 Bouverie Street, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia

Received 15 May 2015. Revised 10 December 2015. Accepted 15 December 2015. Available online 7 January 2016. 

Highlights

• Owner management does not exempt community forestry enterprises from agency threats.
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  In contexts where the CFE is highly embedded in the social networks of a geographical community, owner management can result in agency problems due to honest incompetence and deficits of expertise, as well as moral hazard derived from self-control issues.
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  Separation of ownership and control solved agency problems in Guatemalan CFEs.
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  In order for local forest owners to maximize the benefits of CFEs, proper training in business administration is a basic, but often overlooked, precondition for success.

Abstract 

Community forestry enterprises are increasing participation in forestry activity and have become a favoured approach for reaching goals of conservation, poverty reduction and community development. Much has been written about the importance of supportive policy frameworks, technical assistance, the broader market in which these enterprises operate and the need for more significant control by communities over forests and their benefits through secure resource rights as key points of action. However, there is still a considerable knowledge gap in terms of understanding their organizational behaviour and how it affects the accomplishment of their goals. This paper takes a first step in filling this gap and analyses managerial behaviour in CFEs through the use of theories on principal–agent relationships. Data collected from CFEs in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve in Petén, Guatemala reveal important insights about managerial behaviour in these firms and how embeddedness of the CFE within the wider community plays a major role in managerial decision-making. Several policy implications are derived from these findings.

Keywords

Community forestry enterprises

Mayan Biosphere Reserve

Principal–agent relationships

Stewardship

Agency

Embeddedness

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 Table 1

Table 1.

Fig. 1.

 Table A1

Table A1.

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