INTRODUCTION

There is no shortage of places in the world where forests and their resources are subject to acrimonious, even fierce, conflicts. Across a range of jurisdictions, community forestry is one of the solutions being promoted. Definitions of community forestry contain the common perspective that local control of local natural resources helps to produce multiple benefits for local communities. Ideally, community forestry is different from conventional forest management and planning approaches. Community-based environmental resource management and planning seeks to achieve sustainability, fairness, and efficiency in relation to tenure arrangements, stakeholder representation, and the use of all available forms of knowledge in decision-making to support ecologically sustainable practice and mitigate conflict. In some instances, the potential for success of community forestry has been diminished by excessive expectations. However, defining a role for communities in managing local forests is a challenge for government agencies, forestry professionals, firms and communities themselves. The approach holds promise, but there are a range of dynamic factors and contextual conditions that influence the impact and efficacy of community forestry. This book provides a critical look at community forestry in North America and Northern Europe, one that seeks a more incisive look at the concept, its promise and its limitations.

COMMUNITIES AND FORESTS

Community forestry is neither a new concept nor a new practice. It represents a traditional and longstanding approach to managing human interactions with forest lands and resources, common in developing regions and among the indigenous societies of developed regions (Poffenberger 1990; Mallik and Rahman 1994; Baker and Kusel 2003; Menzies 2004). Over about the past 150 years, there has been a slow and sporadic adoption of community forestry in North America, typically as an alternative to large-scale industrial and state-run forest management. While community interests often have had to compete with industrial interests and conventional forms of western forestry, a blend of industrial and ecoforestry methods is used in community forests in developed countries (Duinker and Pulkki 1998; Beckley 1998; Krogman and Beckley 2002; Teitelbaum et al. 2006; Bullock et al. 2009). Evidently discord among conventional industrial and community-based approaches has more to do with contrasting principles and vested interests than with actual preferences for forestry practices.