Moving forward in collaborative forest management: Role of external actors for sustainable Forest socio-ecological systems

Published Date
January 2017, Vol.74:13–19, doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2016.10.010

Author 

• Abrar J Mohammed ^a,,
• Makoto Inoue ^a,
• Ganesh Shivakoti ^b,

• aLaboratory of Forest Environmental Studies, The University of Tokyo, 1-1-1 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan
• bDepartment of Agribusiness Management (ABM), Asian Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand

Received 17 May 2016. Revised 22 October 2016. Accepted 27 October 2016. Available online 6 November 2016

Highlights

• Collaborative Forest Management (CFM) is promoted in tropical countries to achieve sustainability.
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  We model association of government involvement in local forestry activities with sustainability.
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  The approach is a departure from most CFM researches that emphasis on policy process.
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  Data from 77 sites covering seven countries is used.
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  The result identifies activities that are associated with sustainability when government is involved.

Abstract 

Collaborative Forest Management (CFM) of local forest users and governments promoted to achieve sustainable forest Social-Ecological Systems (SESs) by consolidating strengths of these actors. Although much of the writings on CFM acknowledge its potential to deliver sustainable SESs, knowledge about what specific role of government can strengthen local forest management and utilization is still poor at best. This study aims to fill the gap by analyzing meta-data from International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database for 77 SESs (IFRI sites) in seven countries. We used Ordinal logistic regression to model association between government's Forester Department involvement in important forest management activities and sustainability of forest SES. Our result shows that Forester Department involvement in planting, forest maintenance activities and forest benefit sharing among forest users are associated with sustainable SESs while their involvement in monitoring, sanctioning and transfer of local people harvest right are associated with unsustainable SESs. Our finding has important implications for the ongoing local to global level discourse on how to structure appropriate government interventions to achieve positive social and environmental outcomes from local forest management. However, we suggest precaution not to overstretch the implication of our findings as a panacea for CFM.

Keywords

Forest conservation

Livelihood

Social and ecological synergy

Sustainability

Tropical Forest

IFRI

Multi-country study

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• DOCX (1.3M)

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  Corresponding author.

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