In this guidebook, we share suggestions for how a team of facilitators and a community forest user group (CFUG) can catalyse and maintain an approach to governance and management that draws on and strengthens the CFUG’s own adaptive and collaborative capacities. This approach fits within the Community Forestry framework and supports CFUGs in addressing two fundamental challenges: equity and the generation of livelihood benefits.

This study analyses Indonesia’s experience with its Reforestation Fund, and examines implications for REDD+. The Reforestation Fund (Dana Reboisasi, DR) is a national forest fund financed by a volume-based timber levy to support reforestation and forest rehabilitation. Since 1989, the fund has had receipts of US $5.8 billion. During the Soeharto era, the Ministry of Forestry allocated more than US $1.0 billion in cash grants and loans from the Reforestation Fund to promote commercial plantation development.

As community involvement in natural forest management expands and matures, the need to lodge the rights and obligations of both state and community in workable and legally binding institutional frameworks becomes more pressing. This is particularly so where power and authority are being redistributed. This publication looks specifically at Tanzania, where forest-local communities are beginning to be designated as the management authority of particular woodlands and, in some cases, even their owners.

Bulungan regency is the northern part of the province of East Kalimantan, Indonesia. In the course of the last decade, Kalimantan's or Borneo's hinterland has been the target of unprecedented non-timber forest products (NTFP) collecting activity. More intensive NTFP use has contributed to unsustainable extractive practices and environmental damage and to deep social and political disruption. This book examines northern East Kalimantan's trade networks. The historical scope extends from about 1880 to present and primarily focus on Long Pujungan and Malinau districts.

Projects implemented as part of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol will have the dual mandate of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to sustainable development. Basic agreement on core elements was reached in 2001, including the decision to allow afforestation and reforestation projects. However, it is not yet clear what rules will address social concerns.

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are being considered worldwide with great interest and expectation. Proposals to create agreements in which beneficiaries of environmental services pay landowners directly for the provision or protection of these services are innovative and promising. But what real PES experiences are actually out there? This work assesses a range of PES or PES-type experiences in one country, Bolivia, in the fields of carbon sequestration, protection of watershed services, biodiversity and aesthetic landscape values.

Very large numbers of the rural poor derive some part of their livelihood inputs from forest resources, in different ways and to different extents. For many the dependence on forests is a function of their poverty, because they lack better alternatives. Helping meet their subsistence and survival needs can therefore be as important a role for forestry aid as supporting those able to increase their incomes through forest activities, but needs to avoid encouraging forms of forest dependence that could lock the very poor into continued poverty.

This study has two central concerns: the state of human health in forests, and the causal links between forests and human health. Within this framework, we consider four issues related to tropical forests and human health. First, we discuss forest foods, emphasizing the forest as a food-producing habitat, human dependence on forest foods, the nutritional contributions of such foods, and nutrition-related problems that affect forest peoples. Our second topic is disease and other health problems.

In recent years, awareness has grown in Nepal and globally regarding two of community forestry’s most critical challenges: equity and livelihoods. Yet even as understanding of these challenges has improved, actors from the local to the national levels in Nepal continue to be confronted with the dilemma of how to address these challenges in such a diverse, complex and dynamic context. This synthesis explores an adaptive collaborative approach to governance and management as one avenue to meet these challenges.

This paper analyses the underlying causes of secondary forest formation and recovery in India, particularly the Western Ghats region of south India, from precolonial times to the present. In the pre colonial period, hunter gatherers, shifting cultivators and settled cultivators were the dominant users of forest land, with some limited timber felling by local chieftains and kings. There was limited secondary forest formation following extractive activities by the communities and the State.