Appie Van de Rijt

In August 2014 the community forestry decree for the DRC was signed, promulgating the modalities for local communities to obtain a forest concession. This important step towards the finalization of the forest legal framework concerning community forestry brings communities one step closer to the use of the forests for local development. Forest communities often hold customary rights over land and community forestry provides additional legal opportunities use these forests for their local development. Community forestry is a concept that has been implemented globally, often with success. In particularly Cameroon, the concept has been implemented more recently with mixed results. Other countries in the region, Gabon and the DRC, have seen implementation of this forest governance model on a pilot scale. This study provides an overview of the experiences obtained with community forestry in Central Africa, and summarizes the lessons learned from them. In the DRC, community based natural resource management projects provide additional lessons useful for the implementation of community forestry. The study is based on a literature study, but was complemented with expert interviews with representatives of NGO´s and bilateral development cooperation. Based on the collected data the study has indicated 15 key-points which require attention to make community forestry more successful. Aspects that require additional attention are often reflections of societal issues visible on all levels of governance (e.g. elite rent capturing, need for accountability), and the risk of generalization of communities forms a threat to successful implementation. The key findings of the study are: 1. Community forestry has potential 2. The legal framework needs to be completed 3. Land tenure needs to be secured 4. The DRC is too diverse for a “one size fits all” approach 5. Customary institutions need to be recognized 6. Rights of vulnerable groups need to be guaranteed 7. Natural resource planning needs to be participatory 8. Solutions for individual small scale logging are needed 9. REDD+ can be combined with community forestry 10. Governance needs to be improved 11. Elite rent capturing should be prevented 12. Accountability is needed to prevent conflicts 13. Support for community forestry should meet the threshold 14. Forest uses other than timber should be taken into account 15. Information should be shared Important lessons are available to make community forestry more successful, but sharing and evaluation of existing experiences are required to avoid the mistakes made elsewhere, and to avoid the pitfalls posed by the national governance context.

The radical forest policy reforms during the 1990’s democratized land and forest tenure in Bolivia. Since 2008, the current government continued this process with increasing management options for communal forestry. The recent changes of the forest regime have provided previously marginalized communities in the Northern Bolivian Amazon with a wider range of legal opportunities to benefit from their forest resources. The process of regulatory flexibilizations consisted out of continuous policy changes which gradually provided communities with increased options to harvest timber individually, to use artisanal technologies and to increase their harvesting frequency and volume.
This study was aimed at understanding the effects of the changes on community forestry and was performed in the Bolivian department of Pando as a part of a CIFOR research project to understand the dynamics of domestic markets and timber legality in the tri-national border zone in the Peruvian, Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon. A wide variety of stakeholders of community forestry were interviewed for the investigation. The main stakeholders were community members,
chainsaw operators and various governmental and non-governmental representatives. The obtained qualitative and quantitative data provided a first impression on the situation of timber legality in the community forestry sector after the policy reforms.
The reform has addressed some of the underlying causes for non-compliance, such as financial, technical and barriers that planned forest management posed for community members and the desire to operate individually rather than communally. The study revealed that the large informal timber sector has only formalized party, despite the legal alternative provided by the regulatory change. The levels of informality suggest that there are several motivations to continue with informal
timber production.
The study has identified two main motivations for the continuation of informality in the small scale timber production sector in Pando. Firstly, the continuous policy changes and incomplete or absent channels of information result in the difficulty of obtaining factual and complete information
on the legal framework and secondly, the effects of the timber taxation on the profitability of the production. Under the current conditions, the timber taxation reduces the profitability in such a severe way that in some areas legal timber extraction is not economically viable anymore. Possible methods are proposed to address the problems, and which are aimed to stimulate voluntary compliance with the legal framework.