Incentives and Constraints of Community and Smallholder Forestry

Dear Colleagues,

Since the 1990s, the forestry sector has been reformed in a large number of countries. In many of these countries, the reforms have aimed to promote forest-based development, or at least, to allow local communities and smallholders to legally benefit from the forests they had customarily been relying on, at least partially, for their daily subsistence. More recently, forests and forest lands are being re-valued and re-appropriated as a repository of carbon stocks or as areas for expanding agro-industries or bio-energy production.

The proposed Special Issue brings together case studies of communities that have been subjected to specific efforts for promoting community forestry, or communities that have adapted to new opportunities for transforming forest management activities as a strategy for improving their own livelihoods. The proposed Special Issue will include case studies from tropical Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The cases analyze how efforts to promote community forestry have panned out, and why they have generated positive outcomes, where that has happened. They examine the on-going policy or regulatory constraints that communities face and/or the persistent limitations along forest product value chains. The papers further examine how constraints limit local forest-based entrepreneurship, and how communities have responded to these newly emerging constraints. Together, the papers present an invaluable perspective on the prospects for forestry activities to progressively contribute to improving rural livelihoods when efforts to promote the latter coincide with a reassessment of the value of forests as global commons or territories for new productive options.

Prof. Dr. Wil de Jong
Dr. Pia Katila
Dr. Glenn Galloway
Dr. Pablo Pacheco
Guest Editor

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