Mexico S Community Forest Enterprises

The road to sustainable forest management and stewardship has been debated for decades. Some advocate for governmental control and oversight. Some say that the only way to stem the tide of deforestation is to place as many tracts as possible under strict protection. Caught in the middle of this debate, forest inhabitants of the developing world struggle to balance the extraction of precarious livelihoods from forests while responding to increasing pressures from national governments, international institutions, and their own perceptions of environmental decline to protect biodiversity, restore forests, and mitigate climate change. Mexico presents a unique case in which much of the nation’s forests were placed as commons in the hands of communities, who, with state support and their own entrepreneurial vigor, created community forest enterprises (CFEs). David Barton Bray, who has spent more than thirty years engaged with and researching Mexican community forestry, shows that this reform has transformed forest management in that country at a scale and level of maturity unmatched anywhere else in the world. For decades Mexico has been conducting a de facto large-scale experiment in the design of a national social-ecological system (SES) focused on community forests. What happens when you give subsistence communities rights over forests, as well as training, organizational support, equipment, and financial capital? Do the communities destroy the forest in the name of economic development, or do they manage them sustainably, generating current income while maintaining intergenerational value as a resource for their children? Bray shares the scientific and social evidence that can now begin to answer these questions. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and the interested public on the future of global forest resilience and the possibilities for a good Anthropocene.

Mexico leads the world in community management of forests for the commercial production of timber. Yet this success story is not widely known, even in Mexico, despite the fact that communities around the globe are increasingly involved in managing their own forest resources. To assess the achievements and shortcomings of Mexico's community forest management programs and to offer approaches that can be applied in other parts of the world, this book collects fourteen articles that explore community forest management from historical, policy, economic, ecological, sociological, and political perspectives. The contributors to this book are established researchers in the field, as well as many of the important actors in Mexico's nongovernmental organization sector. Some articles are case studies of community forest management programs in the states of Michoacán, Oaxaca, Durango, Quintana Roo, and Guerrero. Others provide broader historical and contemporary overviews of various aspects of community forest management. As a whole, this volume clearly establishes that the community forest sector in Mexico is large, diverse, and has achieved unusual maturity in doing what communities in the rest of the world are only beginning to explore: how to balance community income with forest conservation. In this process, Mexican communities are also managing for sustainable landscapes and livelihoods.

Who makes land use decisions, how are decisions made, and who influences whom, how and why? This working paper is part of a series based on research studying multilevel decision-making institutions and processes. The series is aimed at providing insight i

Best practice trends that could help an medium forest enterprises develop. Mechanisms that could improve support for small and medium forest enterprises. Information and institutional gaps. Recommendations for better links to markets, service providers an processes.

This review summarizes the published literature, as well as any available information provided by NGOs or project proponents, on the practice of community forest management (CFM) in the Peruvian Amazon. It provides an overview of literature related to land-use and forest management by rural populations in the Peruvian Amazon, placing this information in the broader context of the forestry sector in Peru. The review describes the different manifestations of CFM in Peru and the most widely studied cases of CFM projects. The document also examines some emerging initiatives, summarizes the main challenges for CFM and highlights important areas for future research. One key finding of this review is that there is a general lack of scientific analyses of CFM in Peru: most information is available only via project reports prepared by project proponents and/or donors. The review stresses that community forest management takes many forms. People throughout the Amazon have long relied on forest resources for their shifting cultivation systems, and timber and NTFPs are central to the livelihoods of many. Typically, forest use has occurred informally with little oversight or control by the state. Beginning in the 1980s, environmental NGOs have introduced CFM initiatives in Peru. To date, most CFM projects focus only on indigenous communities to support timber management; by contrast, scientific studies have focused on forest use within subsistence livelihood systems. Given that there are approximately 2 million non-indigenous rural Amazonians in Peru, the forest footprint and market impacts of non-indigenous smallholder forest management are likely to be much greater than recognized. However, very little is known about these endogenous smallholder-led systems. More research is needed to increase our understanding of the heterogeneity of these systems and the opportunities and challenges that they represent.

Professor Max Krott, Director of the Institute of Forest Policy and Nature Conservation at the University of Göttingen, Germany, introduces the most important political players and stakeholders, including the forest owners, the general population, forest workers and employees, forest associations and administration, as well as the media. He illustrates the political and regulatory instruments using examples in current forest policy. Forest Policy Analysis places a special emphasis on the informal processes that are indispensable in understanding practical politics. References made to current English and German-language publications on forest policy studies enable further information to be found with concern to special issues.