Community management of tropical rainforests and international cooperation: Lessons to be learned

摘要

International aid projects for community management of natural or planted forests in the tropics often come up against similar problems: insufficient planning, poor quality management plans, a lack of criteria and economic analysis, use of protected forests or degraded soils to produce timber, rejection of other development alternatives, lack of compliance with essential conditions for the project's success and inappropriate deadlines and financing schedules causing dissatisfaction among local communities. Many of these problems are a matter of government responsibility in tropical countries. Examples are the adoption of management plans that do not ensure that extractive activities are sustainable; change of use from protective to production forests, based (exclusively) on political decisions; non-compliance with essential contractual conditions such as local community access to forest resources; issuing logging licences and permits or allocating compensatory resources. The international community is well aware of these problems, but they are never plainly addressed. For example, compliance with contractual obligations and high-quality management plans could be more stringently enforced by introducing mandatory economic analyses of project benefits for local communities. The duration of forest management projects should also be longer than currently provided for, and technical support should become much more substantial, especially as regards the basic principles of forest management.