Community-based forestry in Mexico: can it reverse processes of degradation?
✍ Scribed by D. Klooster
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 254 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1085-3278
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
To arrest processes of resource degradation, researchers and activists increasingly advocate community-based approaches, which recognize local tenure rights and devolve management responsibilities to local communities. But de jure community control does not necessarily eliminate the problem. In Mexico, more than 70 percent of remaining forests are the common properties of thousands of rural communities. During most of this century, however, custodial forest management policies and concessions to large industries alienated local people from using their forests or participating in their conservation. This led to forest degradation and deforestation through the concessionaire's highgrading and the timber smuggling and land conversion carried on by members of excluded communities. Since the 1980s, a community-based alternative has arisen, in which communities manage their own logging enterprises operating in their communal forests. In a case-study community, bene®ts from forestry increased dramatically after community control and forest management improved. But severe problems remain, including corruption and the concentration of forestry bene®ts among a local elite, and forest-degrading timber smuggling among many commoners. These problems re¯ect an imbalance of power in the community and weakened common property institutions. This situation contrasts with seven other forestry communities that maintain communal accountability over logging businesses, better distribution of the bene®ts and restrictions of resource management, and internally legitimate control over timber smuggling and unsanctioned clearing. A comparison of the history and institutional characteristics of these communities suggests that parallel policies of institutional investment and capacity building will enhance the success of community-based approaches to reversing processes of resource degradation.