Abstract
Europe has a wealth of community forest arrangements. This paper aims to transcend the diversity of locally specific terms and forms, to highlight the value of considering them inclusively. Building on methods to make sense of diversity, we use reflexive grounded inquiry in fifteen cases in Italy, Scotland, Slovenia and Sweden. Within four dimensions (forest, community, relationships between them, and relationships with wider society), we identify 43 subdimensions to describe them collectively. Our approach shows how European arrangements contribute to wider discourses of collective natural resource management. Both tradition and innovation in Europe inform options for environmental governance. Arrangements challenge the distinction between ‘communities of place’ and ‘communities of interest’, with implications for social and environmental justice. They exemplify multilevel environmental governance through both vertical and horizontal connections. Emerging from long histories of political and environmental pressures, they have a role in enhancing society’s connection with nature and adaptive capacity.
Highlights
There is a long and rich tradition of communities owning, managing and using forests in Europe (Jeanrenaud 2001; Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users.Peman and De Moor 2013)
Hundreds of scientific papers focus on community forest management in Asia, Africa and North America, many describing community forestry as a state- or donor-imposed agenda, others focusing on indigenous traditions of forest management, others on intermediate, multilayered or innovative arrangements (Ito et al 2005; Hess 2008; Arts 2014; Cossıo et al 2014)
Some models that we initially considered but rejected because they did not fall within this broad delineation included the following: voluntary groups helping to thin woodlands belonging to environmental NGOs in England and a forest owner association in Slovenia
Summary
Research has illustrated the survival or loss of mediaeval commons (Gatto and Bogataj 2015), effects of socialism and post-socialism (Bogataj and Krc 2014; Premrl et al 2015), social innovation (AmbroseOji et al 2015), recent policy programmes (Lawrence and Ambrose-Oji 2015), new groups forming in response to ongoing land reform (Hoffman 2013) and effects on forest management and social equity (Lidestav et al 2013). The overall diversity of European community forest arrangements has featured little in international community forestry literature (Gilmour 2016). Hundreds of scientific papers focus on community forest management in Asia, Africa and North America, many describing community forestry as a state- or donor-imposed agenda, others focusing on indigenous traditions of forest management, others on intermediate, multilayered or innovative arrangements (Ito et al 2005; Hess 2008; Arts 2014; Cossıo et al 2014). While the modern governance language of ‘participation’ and ‘stakeholders’ is often applied to new examples (e.g. McIlveen and Bradshaw 2009), it is challenging to apply these concepts to institutions that have evolved over centuries, and to develop an analysis that includes both ends of this age spectrum
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