An uneven playing field: regulatory barriers to communities making a living from the timber from their forests–examples from Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam

Community forestry (CF) is widely viewed as the solution to many of the challenges facing forest management and governance in the Asia-Pacific region. However, it is often felt that CF is not delivering on its potential. This paper focuses on one possible limitation: the role of regulations in curbing communities’ ability to make a living from their timber resources. The work covers Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam, using policy analyses, national level experts’ workshops, and focus group discussions in two CF sites in each country. The results highlight the fact that there are numerous, often prohibitive, regulations in place. One challenge is the regulations’ complexity, often requiring a level of capacity far beyond the ability of community members and local government staff. The paper puts forward various recommendations including simplifying regulations and making them more outcome-based, and facilitating key stakeholders, including government and community based organizations, working together on the design and piloting of forest monitoring based on mutually agreed forest management outcomes. The recommendations reflect the belief that for CF to succeed, communities must be allowed to make a meaningful living from their forests, a result of which would be increased investment in sustainable forest management

Local-Level Monitoring in Decentralized Forest Management: Exploring the Spaces for Community Participation

This paper explores a participatory monitoring process initiated in Kampong Thom province with 3 Community Forestry (CF) sites where CF development was facilitated by Forestry Administration (FA) staff and externally supported by German Technical Support-Rural Development Programme (GTZ-RDP).The paper details the methodology used and the key outputs produced during the process, it highlights the four main principles of the principle, criteria, and indicator Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) which are: (1) that forest health is maintained, (2) public well-being is improved, (3) community well-being is assured, and (4) external support is effective. The results show that in all three CF, the land integrity and the forest resource itself was improved between the baseline and follow-up surveys. Despite the positive results, many of the challenges and limitations were acknowledged including the difficulty in capturing all different points of view and opinions when there are such a large number of people involved and consulted as well as how this can lead to a slowdown within the whole process and is very expensive. The paper concludes suggesting that a local level monitoring system can help to build local capacity, improve decision-making, reduce conflict between local forest dependents and responsible authorities as well as empower local community members, especially marginalized groups