Abstract
AbstractMany tropical countries continue to devolve forest management to forest‐dwelling communities. The assumption is that local knowledge of forests and community engagement in forest management will attain multiple social and environmental co‐benefits, such as poverty alleviation and reduced deforestation and fires. Evidence for this, however, is scant, commonly hampered by data availability and a lack of technical capacity for implementing statistically robust impact evaluations. Based on a practice‐based review of policy implementation, impact evaluation of case studies and examples of counterfactual analyses from Indonesia, we demonstrate that it is increasingly feasible to determine the conditions under which community forest management will most likely achieve its social and environmental objectives. Adapting community forest management implementation based on feedback from accurate impact evaluation could lead to positive outcomes for people and environment in Indonesia, and across the tropical realm.
Highlights
Devolution of forest management has been an important trend in the governance of global forest assets since the 1980s (Agrawal, Chhatre, & Hardin, 2008; Oldekop, Sims, Karna, Whittingham, & Agrawal, 2019)
We aimed to address three research questions: (a) how are past evaluations of community forest management in Indonesia distributed across different regions or islands, and how have these changed through time?; (b) what indicators or aspects have been commonly evaluated and how frequently have these studies reported positive or negative impacts of community forest management projects?; and (c) how often do these studies apply counterfactual approaches to assess impacts?
How do our review findings inform policies and practices aiming to scale up community forest management? One insight was obtained from semistructured interviews with government, nonprofit and community sectors in Indonesia (Sherman, 2019), which indicated a general belief that the timeline for implementation of Indonesia's community forestry plan was too fast
Summary
Devolution of forest management has been an important trend in the governance of global forest assets since the 1980s (Agrawal, Chhatre, & Hardin, 2008; Oldekop, Sims, Karna, Whittingham, & Agrawal, 2019). Initial impact studies in these regions focused on assessing different outcomes from state forest management versus community management, generally finding better environmental outcomes for the latter (Agrawal & Chhatre, 2007; Chhatre & Agrawal, 2008; Porter-Bolland et al, 2012) How these outcomes are shaped by underlying factors, such as socioeconomic conditions, market access, and biophysical location of villages remains, less well understood (Dasgupta, 2017; Gilmour, 2016; Hajjar et al, 2016; MinVenditti, Moore, & Fleischman, 2017; Rasolofoson, Ferraro, Jenkins, & Jones, 2015). Impact evaluations have been implemented in multiple countries to better understand the role of various drivers in generating positive environmental and social outcomes from community forest management, including in Madagascar (Rasolofoson et al, 2015; Rasolofoson et al, 2017); Peruvian Amazon (Schleicher, Peres, Amano, Llactayo, & Leader-Williams, 2017); Uganda (Jagger, Sellers, Kittner, Das, & Bush, 2018); Thailand (Janmaimool, 2016); Bangladesh (Chowdhury, Zahra, Rahman, & Islam, 2018); Kenya (Busck-Lumholt & Treue, 2018); and Indonesia (Maryudi et al, 2012; Nurrochmat, Dharmawan, Obidzinski, Dermawan, & Erbaugh, 2016)
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