Youth and the Future of Community Forestry

Abstract

Forests managed by Indigenous and other local communities generate important benefits for livelihood, and contribute to regional and global biodiversity and carbon sequestration goals. Yet, challenges to community forestry remain. Rural out-migration, for one, can make it hard for communities to maintain broad and diverse memberships invested in local forest commons. This includes young people, who can contribute critical energy, ideas, and skills and are well positioned to take up community forest governance and work, but often aspire to alternative livelihoods and lifestyles. Through an initiative called the Future of Forest Work and Communities, we sought to connect researchers and practitioners with young people living in forest regions, and explore whether community forestry is, or could be, a viable option for them in a globalising world. We achieved this through two phases of qualitative research: youth visioning workshops and questionnaires conducted in 14 forest communities and regions across 9 countries, and a more in-depth case study of two forest communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. We found important synergies across sites. Youth held strong connections with their communities and local forests, but work and/or study aspirations meant many would likely leave their home communities (at least for a time). Community forestry was not seen as an obvious livelihood pathway by a majority of youth, although interest in forest work was evident through participation in several workshop activities. As community leadership and support organisations consider community forestry as an engine of local development, the research highlights the importance of engaging local youth to understand their interests and ideas, and thus identify practical and meaningful ways to empower them as community and territorial actors.

Youth Inclusion in Forest Policy Dialogue: Contemplating Human–Forest Relationships through Arts-Based Methods

“…Achieving higher inclusion of youth is challenging in circumstances where the powerful actors hold a narrow view on what is good participation (Adeyeye, Hagerman and Pelai, 2019). On the other hand, recent findings from Mexican forest communities suggest that reaching out to young people to understand their ideas and aspirations may be a way to start to empower them and make them take active roles in their villages (Robson et al, 2020). These research examples together with our present findings tell us that arts-based methods alone are insufficient and ineffective.…”

Impact and mechanism of rural labor migration on forest management income: Evidence from the Jiangxi Province, China

“…The possible reason is that, the youth group has a stronger learning ability and better labor ability than the elderly group to conduct forest management, so they also have greater opportunities to obtain non-farm employment. Therefore, forest management was not taken as an obvious livelihood strategy by the majority of the youth (Robson et al, 2020). As labor-intensive forest management requires higher labor ability, the migration effect in the youth group has a greater inhibitory effect on the forest management income than that in the elderly group.…”

Addressing Gender Inequities in Forest Science and Research

“…In community forestry, negative impacts of marginalisation of women can be particularly damaging. For instance, rural women have been excluded from decentralised forest governance structures in Southern Tanzania and this has caused an unequal distribution of the benefits of the natural resources that forests provide [10], potentially causing other social and economic problems for women and children, especially for sustainable development under a changing climate [11,12]. The exclusion of women in natural resource management is a global issue associated with the marginalisation of Indigenous communities and their knowledge systems [13,14].…”