At the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, partnerships were touted as one of the key routes to sustainable development. But can partnerships really deliver improvements to rural livelihoods? This paper reviews one set of claimed partnerships, those between forestry companies and local individuals or communities, to assess the benefits, and the costs, to local livelihoods. Most arrangements between forestry companies and local communities are not equitable enough to be called partnerships, so the term ''deal'' is preferred. Positive local impacts of company-community deals include sharing of risks, better returns to land than otherwise possible, opportunities for income diversification, access to paid employment, development of new skills, upgrading of local infrastructure and environmental improvement. However, company-community deals have not yet proved sufficient to lift people out of poverty. They remain supplementary rather than central to income generation. Furthermore, while some deals have resulted in greater cohesion and organisation among community groups, there is as yet little evidence of substantial increases in community bargaining power. Ways forward to increase returns to communities (and to their counterpart companies) centre on moving towards more equal partnerships, by raising community bargaining power, fostering the roles of brokers and other third parties, and developing equitable, efficient and accountable governance frameworks.
SUMMARYPeople's livelihoods and the forests upon which they depend are frequently threatened because people are marginalized from governance. The Forest Governance Learning Group is an independent alliance developing practical tactics for making progress in such situations in Africa. It recognises that the current international drive to combat illegal forestry could do more harm than good if social justice is not brought centre-stage. In Malawi and Mozambique sub-groups have recognised the real danger that communities will disengage from forest stewardship unless practical mechanisms for their ownership and responsibility are found. In Uganda, a sub-group has used the space created by decentralisation and high-profile cases of timber trade corruption to develop improved systems. In Ghana, the work points to the potential powder keg created at community level by those involved in flouting the law and over-harvesting timber. A renegotiation amongst stakeholders through forest forums is being called for in bringing the major abusers to book.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.