Whereabouts devolution and collective forest management?

Devolution in forestry generally refers to the transfer of some degree of central government authority to local responsibility. It commonly takes the form of recommendations by external advisors in developing country situations who encourage formally organized decision making by a local political community. This paper reviews the literature on local tenure, the summaries of case studies in forestry, and the broader history of experience with collectives and cooperatives with the objective of identifying the characteristic cases where some form of collective or community forest management might be successful. The paper identifies four cases. It concludes that, at some level, smaller groups of managers may cooperate in labor and capital intensive activities like fire control or harvesting, or in specialized activities beyond their personal expertise, activities like processing and marketing their products. Successful and sustainable community-wide collective enterprises seldom include agricultural or forest land—with the possible, and likely impermanent, exception of low-valued open access land beyond the perimeter of agricultural crops and managed forests.