Governmental and non-governmental actors have been promoting community forestry enterprises (CFEs) as a sustainable development strategy, encouraging their compliance with official laws, policies, and programs. However, formal forest regulations often are conservation-oriented and overly technocratic and structured – in contrast with communities’ (lesser-known) informal ways to manage their communal forest resources, which tend to be more holistic and context-appropriate. In that context, Indigenous peoples may apply formal rules in their own way, mixing them with, or adapting them to, their own informal, traditional norms, resulting in institutional innovations that better fit both conservation and wellbeing goals and align with local conditions. By looking at different types of CFEs in 13 communities across a river basin in the Peruvian Amazon, this study develops a critical understanding of Indigenous adaptations of formal rules that govern forest commons to fit both conservation and wellbeing goals, as well as to better respond to the local context, aligning them with local, informal institutions. Our findings uncover a wide variety of innovative institutional systems that are more holistic, appropriate, and just than the original formal ones. We reveal the creation of more flexible, less structured versions of formal rules for forest use, monitoring, and commercialization on the ground, to secure their livelihoods, needs, and wellbeing, and make rule application and enforcement easier and less costly. Communities also create more comprehensive and culturally-appropriate versions of formal rules that regulate land tenure and producer associations, by complementing them with specific, traditional informal systems. Our findings contribute to closing the knowledge gap concerning the role of informal institutions in policymaking and management of forest commons, and to better inform existing efforts to promote CFEs to make them more effective and just. Findings are relevant for Peru and the Amazon as a whole.
