Self-Governance and Forest Resources

Forest resources share attributes with many other resource systems that make difficult their governance and management in a sustainable, efficient, and equitable manner. While some ‘forests’ are small enough that fencing them or protecting their borders from intrusion is relatively easy, excluding beneficiaries from access and use of most forests is costly. The difficulty of exclusion creates the possibility that individuals who benefit from the use of a forest will not contribute to its long-term sustainability. For many uses of a forest, one person’s harvesting subtracts products that are not available to others. Thus, many aspects of forests can be considered as common-pool resources. Common-pool resources are characterized by difficulty of exclusion and generate finite quantities of resource units so that one person’s use subtracts from the quantity of resource available to others (E. Ostrom, Gardner and Walker 1994). The ecosystem services generated by forest resources – watershed protection, carbon sequestration, biodiversity enhancement, etc. – may be considered as externalities or as public goods. Ecosystem services are, however, closely tied to the sustainability of the forest stock, and are thus threatened by the same set of incentives that tempt users of an unregulated forest resource into a race to use up the timber and destroy the forest itself.