Community forestry (CF) is widely viewed as the solution to many of the challenges facing forest management and governance in the Asia-Pacific region. However, it is often felt that CF is not delivering on its potential. This paper focuses on one possible limitation: the role of regulations in curbing communities' ability to make a living from their timber resources. The work covers Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam, using policy analyses, national level experts' workshops, and focus group discussions in two CF sites in each country. The results highlight the fact that there are numerous, often prohibitive, regulations in place. One challenge is the regulations' complexity, often requiring a level of capacity far beyond the ability of community members and local government staff. The paper puts forward various recommendations including simplifying regulations and making them more outcome-based, and facilitating key stakeholders, including government and community based organizations, working together on the design and piloting of forest
OPEN ACCESSForests 2015, 6 3434 monitoring based on mutually agreed forest management outcomes. The recommendations reflect the belief that for CF to succeed, communities must be allowed to make a meaningful living from their forests, a result of which would be increased investment in sustainable forest management.
The forest landscapes of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) are changing dramatically, with a multitude of impacts from local to global levels. These changes invariably have their foundations in forest governance. The aim of this paper is to assess perceptions of key stakeholders regarding the state of forest governance in the countries of the GMS. The work is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the perceptions of forest governance in the five GMS countries, involving 762 representatives from government, civil society, news media, and rural communities. The work identified many challenges to good forest governance in the countries in the region, as well as noting reasons for optimism. Generally speaking, there was a feeling that the policies, legislation, and institutional frameworks were supportive, but there are numerous challenges in terms of implementation, enforcement, and compliance. The work also presents a program of activities recommended by the research participants to address governance challenges and opportunities in the GMS countries. These include the development of a forest governance monitoring system, and initiatives that support informed decision-making by forest product consumers in the region as well as the implementation of a capacity development program for non-state actors (e.g., civil society, news media) to ensure they are more able to support the diverse, and often demanding, forest governance initiatives.
The reduction of illegal logging and related trade has been on the international policy agenda since the 1990s. The EU's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative (EU-FLEGT) seeks to address illegal logging through a scheme that rests on multistakeholder negotiations. However, past initiatives seeking to reform forest governance in the global South have reproduced the uneven outcomes of colonial forest governance by further empowering national government authorities. In the case of Thailand, FLEGT negotiations between November 2013 and April 2021 succeeded in opening a political space for civil society to engage with government actors. However, FLEGT negotiations during this period failed to address the uneven outcomes of forest governance, benefiting elites at the expense of the rural poor due to an 'anti-politics effect. The FLEGT multistakeholder negotiations did not consider the uneven historical relations to land and resource rights nor the intrinsic power dynamics of different actor groups. As such, dominant actors from the government and private sector succeeded in structuring the terrain of the FLEGT negotiations to determine which civil society demands for reforms to tenure and resource rights they would concede, and which they would not.
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