Actor, Customary Regulation and Case Study of Collective Forest Tenure Reform Intervention in China

Changing Perceptions of Forest Value and Attitudes toward Management of a Recently Established Nature Reserve: A Case Study in Southwest China

“…Restriction of access rights to forest resources has led to a potential conflict [22,37,38], while over decentralization could also cause some potential problems. For instance, although the implemented collective forest tenure reform in China had made substantial progress in providing for sustainable forest management and a reduction of poverty through a power transfer to the local inhabitants, it also caused negative effects on forest management [22,26,28]. Because forest use and ownership in the course of decentralization are the arenas of conflict and struggle, implementation of forest tenure reform involved commercial transactions, which led to a small number of rich people occupying a much larger amount of forest.…”

“…Consequently, with regard to most of the local inhabitants, they still lack adequate forest resources to support their livelihood needs. In particular, most private forests have been eliminated because the owners needed to gain a return for their investment and simultaneously planted monocultures of economically valuable tree species [26]. This management approach is not applied with the goal of benefitting biodiversity conservation in protected areas.…”

“…This trend continued until the catastrophic downstream flooding in 1998. Since then, some forest programs focusing on environmental protection and restoration have been implemented, including an immediate ban on all commercial logging of state forests and the implementation of the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) [25,26]. However, these programs have been criticized for their monolithic approach, particularly in light of their effects on biodiversity [27,28].…”

“…In some areas, ecotourism has been promoted as a means for achieving participatory management in nature reserves in a way that allows managers to achieve sustainable forest management, such as in the Wolong Nature Reserve and the Shennongjia National Reserve in China [13,50,51]. The decentralization of forest tenure in 2008, known as Collective Forest Tenure Reform, has prevailed as a method of combining forest management with poverty reduction [22,26].…”

The Effect of Forest Tenure on Forest Composition in a Miao Area of Guizhou, China

“…Feng shui forests and divine trees were mostly found in state and collective forests. There have been traditional customary laws to conserve these forests in Miao areas since ancient times; they still play an important role and are, in many cases, even more effective than central government rules (Yu 2006;Luo et al 2015). The management of state and collective forests was-and still is-largely influenced by local customary laws.…”