Hajjar, Reem

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.

In recent decades, formal community-based forest management has gained significant attention, particularly in developing countries, where a large proportion of forest areas have been transferred to local communities. However, substantial changes in people-forest relationships have been reported following this formalization, driven by both internal and external shifts in the social-ecological systems in which forests and forest-dependent communities are embedded.

Our study explores how community forestry has influenced people-forest relationships within the evolving context of the Prey Lang Extended Landscape in Cambodia, which has undergone profound changes over the last five decades. Between March and August 2024, we conducted interviews with community forestry stakeholders, including representatives from the government, civil society, and local community members—such as community forest leaders, elders, forest-dependent individuals, the poor, and youth—across 20 sites in the landscape.
Our findings reveal that over the last five decades, changing social, economic, and political conditions have significantly impacted local communities' engagement with forest commons. Prior to the 1990s, no formal community-based institutions existed in the landscape to manage forests. However, the political, economic, and social changes increased pressure on forests and land—key resources for local livelihoods—sparking a surge of interest in community forestry during the 1990s and early 2000s. This led to high participation in the establishment of community forests, many of which were formalized starting in 2007 with the introduction of appropriate legal frameworks. Despite community forestry generally meeting expectations for forest protection, interest in collective action has waned in recent years. As economic opportunities have expanded and the nature of pressures on forests and land has shifted, the opportunity cost of participation for community members has increased. In many cases, forest protection responsibilities now rest with only a few committed individuals.

Our observations suggest that in rapidly changing contexts, especially in developing countries and post-conflict regions, the goals of community forestry must align with the evolving social, economic, and political landscape for its sustenance. A robust program design alone is insufficient; periodic reviews and adjustments are essential to ensure the program remains responsive to existing and emerging challenges, leverages new opportunities, and delivers equitable benefits to all community members.