One of the challenges the communities face when managing forests is the lack of a systematic and transparent monitoring system that can be used to monitor their resource management strategies and to communicate their successes to outsiders.

A heated debate has been going on for roughly three decades about who should hold stewardship over Asia’s tropical forests. This essay reviews how the debate evolved. Communal forestry advocates like NGOs point out that local groups living in remote corners of countries like Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and India have been managing forests for centuries.

Several Indonesian plywood industry companies involved in logging are beginning to adopt improved harvesting practices. A number of organizations and individuals have undertaken analyses of the costs and impacts of implementing selected reduced impact logging (RIL) components. These analyses include cost estimates of the impact of RIL compared with conventional logging (CL).

This paper first provides a brief overview of what are and what represent forest ecosystem services. Then it considers the issues of price and valuation, and shows that valuation itself is not a solution but merely a tool.

A forestry advisor for the Co-operative League of the United States describes a programme to build co-operation between the forestry services and local communities in eastern Zambia. The programme has involved stakeholder workshops to write management plans, and support for more productive agriculture.

The manager of Meru Forest Plantation in northern Tanzania describes how the plantation has made agreements with local communities to share responsibilities and benefits. As a result conflicts over livestock grazing have been minimised, corruption over land distribution has been reduced and no forest fires have taken place for three years.

The overall aim of this study was to explore what the development community can do, or facilitate, to significantly improve livelihoods in semi-arid systems.The authors based their analysis on two case-study sites in the communal lands of southern Zimbabwe.

This infobrief provides key points that will benefit disadvantaged groups in multistakeholder negotiations. Negotiations that include all the groups or stakeholders concerned should increase democratic decision-making and compromise. Experience has shown that the benefits that disandvantaged groups receive from multistakeholder negotiations depend on how the negotiations are done.

This document is a report on the implementation of an initial project of Bulungan Research Forest in East Kalimantan, Indonesia 1997-2001 with financial support from International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO).

CIFOR's research in the Bulungan Model Forest in Malinau, East Kalimantan, Indonesia took the form of a 3-year investigation into ways of achieving forest sustainability in a large forest landscape with diverse, rapidly changing and conflicting uses. The study reported in this book highligts the complexity of the challenge while also clarifying the key aspects.

Fiche Technique

Les forêts sacrées existent dans tous les pays d’Afrique. Ce sont des lieux mythiques et mystérieux ou sont gardés de grands secrets d’initiation, des objets sacrés et immémoriaux ainsi que des totems. Par conséquent personne ne doit y pénétrer sans y avo