Our decreasing forest landscapes are under huge pressure to deliver local and global needs, from a village’s food and firewood to mitigating climate change. With demand unlikely to fall, the key issue is how we extract what we need. Governments are faced with two contrasting business models: the profit-maximising, often run by distant owners; or locally controlled forestry (LCF), run democratically to sustainably meet various local needs without necessarily maximising profit. Governments are increasingly granting local resource rights to meet development targets and protect forest landscapes to deliver benefits into the future. A compendium of 19 case studies illustrates the viability of this approach and reveals the structures enabling LCF businesses to survive and compete. These findings can now guide the scaling-up of democratic business models through enabling investments by programmes such as the Forest Farm Facility (FFF) and its knowledge network partners in the Forest Connect alliance.
Related Case Studies
Although forest covers 40 per cent of Nepal, the forestry sector’s potential to generate huge employment opportunities is largely untapped. Private sector involvement and investment could create 1.38 million work days a year. But certain policies and administrative hurdles hinder both community and private investment in the sector. The lack...
Soils are the foundation of all terrestrial life on the planet and are essential for agricultural production. Yet unsustainable farming practices are degrading soils across South Asia and many other parts of the world, threatening food security.
Soil fertility and structure can be vastly improved through greater applications of compost...
This report discusses the opportunities presented by the Amapá State government’s intention to make the transition to a green economy. It explores initial progress in green policy and activity, and associated dynamics in the political economy, and lays out a broad but feasible set of sectoral and cross-sectoral policy options...
Governments in sub-Saharan Africa face a dilemma: how to reconcile pledges to feed fast-growing populations with forest conservation? Under Sustainable Development Goal 2 (end hunger, achieve food security etc), African countries aim to fully meet domestic food demand by 2030 — projected to be 70 percent higher than in 2010...