Second-tier community forestry organisations and equitable resource management in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
December 2016
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
handle:10568/78522
License of the resource: 

Community forestry (CF) was initiated in the 1970s as a way to empower communities, alleviate poverty and manage forests. Intermediary organisations are considered to have played a critical role in the sustainability and equitability of community forest management. This study analyses a second-tier institution, ACOFOP [Asociación de Comunidades Forestales de Petén], founded in the mid-1990s by local people in the Maya Biosphere Reserve [MBR] of Guatemala. ACOFOP has been

lauded internationally for its success in supporting communities to achieve both economic and ecological sustainability. However, community forestry in the Petén, ACOFOP and the communities it supports still face multiple threats including challenges from private interests promoting tourism and other mega-projects in the region, and inconsistency in support from successive national governments. As part of an interdisciplinary project on community forestry in Mesoamerica led by Bioversity International, this study draws on participatory action research methods, interviews and literature to identify institutional, social and political factors that have enabled ACOFOP’s success, and could be applied to

other contexts. The second dimension of this project maps and evaluate the language use by different actors in the MBR, focusing on differences in their perspectives on the meaning of institutional accompaniment .

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Millner, N.
Penagaricano, I.
Fernandez, M.
Snook, L.

Corporate Author(s): 

Bioversity International is a global research-for-development organization. We have a vision – that agricultural biodiversity nourishes people and sustains the planet.

We deliver scientific evidence, management practices and policy options to use and safeguard agricultural and tree biodiversity to attain sustainable global food and nutrition security.

We work with partners in low-income countries in different regions where agricultural and tree biodiversity can contribute to improved nutrition, resilience, productivity and climate change adaptation.

Data provider

CGIAR (CGIAR)

CGIAR is the only worldwide partnership addressing agricultural research for development, whose work contributes to the global effort to tackle poverty, hunger and major nutrition imbalances, and environmental degradation.


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