Collective action to secure property rights for the poor: A case study in Jambi Province, Indonesia

"This study presents an approach to analyzing decentralized forestry and natural resource management and land property rights issues, and catalyzing collective action among villages and district governments. It focuses on understanding the current policies governing local people's access to property rights and decision making processes, and learning how collective action among community groups and interaction among stakeholders can enhance local people's rights over lands, resources, and policy processes for development. The authors applied participatory action research in two villages, one each in the Bungo and Tanjabbar districts of Jambi province (Sumatra), Indonesia, to facilitate identification of priorities through phases of planning, action, monitoring, and reflecting. This study finds that action research may be an effective strategy for fostering collective action and maintaining the learning process that leads groups to be more organized and cohesive, and district government officials to be more receptive to stakeholders. A higher level of collective action and support may be needed to avoid elite capture more effectively." authors' abstractDecentralization, Natural resource management, Forest, Collective action, Property rights, Action research, Poverty, Devolution,

Infectious Ideas: Modelling the Diffusion of Ideas Across Social Networks

Will the practice of collecting wild honey while wearing no clothes become a widespread practice in Zimbabwe? Or will beekeeping take over as the main way that people acquire honey? Both practices impact on forest resources; how can the foresters influence the uptake of these ideas? This paper describes an exploratory modelling study investigating how social network patterns affect the way ideas spread around communities. It concludes that increasing the density of social networks increases the spread of successful ideas whilst speeding the loss of ideas with no competitive advantage. Some different kinds of competitive advantage are explored in the context of forest management and rural extension

Masculinities in Forests

Masculinities in Forests: Representations of Diversity demonstrates the wide variability in ideas about, and practice of, masculinity in different forests, and how these relate to forest management. While forestry is widely considered a masculine domain, a significant portion of the literature on gender and development focuses on the role of women, not men. This book addresses this gap and also highlights how there are significant, demonstrable differences in masculinities from forest to forest. The book develops a simple conceptual framework for considering masculinities, one which both acknowledges the stability or enduring quality of masculinities, but also the significant masculinity-related options available to individual men within any given culture. The author draws on her own experiences, building on her long-term experience working globally in the conservation and development worlds, also observing masculinities among such professionals. The core of the book examines masculinities, based on long-term ethnographic research in the rural Pacific Northwest of the US; Long Segar, East Kalimantan; and Sitiung, West Sumatra, both in Indonesia. The author concludes by pulling together the various strands of masculine identities and discussing the implications of these various versions of masculinity for forest management. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of forestry, gender studies and conservation and development, as well as practitioners and NGOs working in these fields

Forests and Human Health: Assessing the Evidence

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