From Supervising ‘subjects’ to Supporting ‘citizens’: Recent Developments in Community Forestry in Asia and Africa

Why community forestry? Forest management by rural communities is as old as history, but community forestry as a sponsored process is recent. While definitions abound, in this paper we use community forestry to mean a process whereby specific community forest users protect and manage state forests in some form of partnership with the government (Hobley 1996). The need to increase community participation in forest management has been a near-universal conclusion of international policy initiatives in tropical forestry over the last 30 years. The justifications for this range from considerations of practicality and cost-effectiveness to philosophical concerns relating to equity and social justice (see Box 1).