RESEARCH NETWORK REPORT # 9

LINKING GOVERNMENT WITH COMMUNITY RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: WHAT'S WORKING AND WHAT'S NOT

A courtship dance circle, the village, and natural environment are depicted in this Warli wall painting. The Warli are a tribal forest people inhabiting the Western Ghats of maharashtra, India.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The 5th Annual Meeting, Linking Government with Community Resource Management: What's Working and What's Not has been supported by the USDA Forest Service's International Forestry Program, the World Bank's Economic Development Institute, USAID's Global Bureau, the Ford Foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund.

We would like to thank all of the individuals and organizations who contributed to Asia Forest Network program activities over the past year. We are particularly grateful to the Wallace Global Fund, USAID's Global Bureau, the Ford Foundation, and the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank for supporting our regional meeting in Surajkund. We would specifically like to acknowledge the support of Alex Moad, George Taylor, Mike Benge, Bob Wallace, Catherine Cameron, Melissa Dan, Jeff Campbell, and Emmanuel D'Silva. We also appreciate the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the encouragement of Kuswata Kartawinata. We are grateful for the continued institutional support the Network receives from the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and from the East-West Center's Program on Environment. Special thanks are due to Richard Buxbaum, Bob Reed, Eric Crystal, and Jeri Foushee, and to Michael Dove, Jeff Fox, Meg White, and Karen Yamamoto. Rowena Soriaga, Angana Chattejee, Alison Schwarz, and Satyanaryana all made extraordinary efforts to ensure the success of our regional meeting. We are particularly grateful to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, India and to the Society for the Promotion of Wastelands Development for providing institutional support for the Asia Forest Network meeting. The encouragement of Samar Singh, S.K. Puri, Syeed Rizvi, Sushil Saigal, and Chetan Agarwal was greatly appreciated. We would. like to express our gratitude to M.F. Ahmad for his active support to the Asia Forest Network during his term as Inspector General of Forests, Government of India. We also appreciate the interest shown by Vinod Vaish, Additional Secretary, and Mr. S. K. Pande, Assistant Inspector General. Finally we wish to thank the foresters, donor agency staff, researchers, and NGO colleagues who took the time to come to Surajkund to share their experiences. Thanks to Jenny Sowerwine for her helpful suggestions in developing this manuscript. We also thank Magdalene Khoo for her layout of this report, Kevin Kolb for graphics, and Jack Brulle at Apollo Printing.

We would like to honor the memory of Molly Kux and J.R. Gupta. Molly committed her professional life to conserving the global environment in socially just ways. She was a much valued supporter of the Asia Forest Network from its origin. J.R. Gupta conducted pioneering community forest management work in the Shivalik Hills of Haryana for over 20 years, inspiring and informing us with his dedication and creative, sensitive work. Both will be distinctly missed, but their contributions remembered, providing a solid foundation for our future efforts.

INTRODUCTION

The 5th Asia forest Network meeting was held at Surajkund, India from December 2nd through the 6th, 1996. The purpose of the meeting was to draw together Asia's collective experiences in devolving rights and responsibilities to communities over the management of the public forest domain. Planners, donors, forest agency staff, NGOs, and community leaders asked what is working and what is not at both the policy and operational level as new management partnerships are created. On the cusp of the 21st century how can this transition in management succeed in responding to the needs of Asia's expanding rural population while sustaining forest ecosystems and their functions?

There have been some remarkable changes in recent years in both formal policies and programs supporting the greater engagement of rural people in the custody of the public forest estate. Nepal and the Philippines began exploring community forest management polices nearly 20 years ago. By the late 1980's India began formulating joint forest management (JFM) policies. Now Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Thailand, and Viet Nam are exploring policy and strategic options that involve communities in public lands management. After over a century of forest land nationalization and growing government agency dominance, the momentum appears to be shifting toward a greater formal role for communities, often in partnership with the state. Yet, this historic regional and even global management transition is constrained by a diversity of factors. Inadequate experience in reformulating policy to support decentralization, resistance of large private sector interests, lack of political will and capacity to implement, and unsupportive procedures and attitudes slow progress. Further, an absence of strong communication linkages and working relationships between government and forest communities all restrain effective reforms in public forest lands management.

Participants at the AFN meeting, and the broader body of professionals and community members working on forest management in the region, possess an immense pool of experience to address the issues above. The meeting organizers hoped to create an opportunity for exchange and synthesis to bring this vast, but scattered, knowledge together to identify common patterns, problems, needs, and solutions, to make them transparent, and to communicate them. The goal of the Asia Forest Network is to facilitate this process. The 80 AFN meeting participants included senior government forestry officers, forestry field staff, researchers, and NGO and community leaders.

During Session I each of the eight participating countries briefly summarized the current state of their national forests and forest communities, and described emerging national community forestry policy trends. Panelists Session II reported on India's experiences with community and joint forest management, highlighting social and institutional developments. Senior forest department professionals presented emerging experiences in reorienting staff and procedures, as well as changes in ecological restoration strategies that emphasize community protection and natural regeneration over costly plantation establishment.

Session III brought together two decades of experience from Nepal and the Philippines in designing and redesigning effective community forestry policy, as well as the challenges Viet Nam faces as an economy in transition moving from socialist to private management, while seeking a role for communities. The session also raised important questions regarding the role of donors and development assistance agencies in long-term public forest management transitions.

The plenary sessions provided information for subgroup discussions held in Session IV. The subgroups dealt with six interrelated issues bearing community forest management to identify what is working and what is not. The topics included the components of enabling policies, agency implementation and transition benchmarks, the use of spatial tools for planning and monitoring, experiences with community management in protected areas, the role of micro planning, and ways to ensure equity and gender balance in forest management reallocation processes.

Session V provided country teams with opportunities to caucus and develop action programs for the coming years. Activities outlined by the India group focused on policy initiatives, community support strategies, and developing mechanisms to accelerate and utilize field learning. The Philippines and Indonesian teams worked to create new agendas for their national programs, while the participants from mainland Southeast Asia collaborated in examining common issues and needs of forest ecosystems and ethnic minorities who comprise their upland regions.

This report brings together the materials and ideas presented at Surajkund, drawing from the panels and discussion groups. In compiling this report, the editors also draw on their own field visits, trip reports, and discussions with Network members and other practitioners over the part two years. This report builds on discussions at Surajkund to provide a regional synthesis of community forest management experiences emerging in Asia, highlighting what's working and what's not.

COUNTRY FOREST POLICY TRENDS

Reports from eight Asian countries underscored important policy shifts that have taken place over the past decade. A growing number of Asia's policy makers perceive the need for policies that can stabilize natural forest resources and prevent further forest loss. In most of the region's countries, greater priority is being ascribed to the environmental service functions of forests versus timber production. Increasingly, both planners and development agencies see strategic opportunities to stabilize natural re- sources through greater involvement of con-annuities and local government in forest protection. Practitioners are encountering a number of constraints in making these policy and operational shifts. These include vested interests of powerful individuals who benefit from maintaining traditional timber exploitation industries, corruption within government and forestry agencies, the conservatism of colleagues who are uncomfortable with change and prefer traditional approaches to public lands management, and finally a lack of experience in formulating and implementing new policies that are supportive of decentralized, participatory management systems. As a consequence, policy changes supportive of community appear to be taking place unevenly. In some nations greater restrictions and bans are being placed on commercial felling, while greater authority is being extended to communities and local governments for public forest lands management. Historic trends in forest management policies in Asian countries reveal some common parallels, including initial periods of forest nationalization, followed by commercial use, with conservation and community involvement policies emerging in the last decade. Asian countries are stressing conservation as timber and forest product imports grow and communities demand a role in management. Socialist countries like China and Viet Nam, with economies in transition, have emphasized public lands privatization in recent policies, but are examining the role of communities. Even large forest product exporting countries like Indonesia are now giving the role of communities greater consideration. While each Asian nation is approaching the question of community involvement in public lands management differently, throughout the region the trend is clearly toward devolving authority, reflecting transitions in process.

CHINA

(Note 1) With over one billion people, demands on China's forest resources are immense. Officially, 263 million hectares are designated forest lands; however, only 134 million hectares possess relatively good forest cover, representing 14 percent of the nation's land area. Natural forests are gradually being replaced by plantations, which now represent approximately one-third of all forest lands. China is struggling to meet growing timber and fuelwood demands, stabilize watershed functioning and promote soil conservation, and to conserve its biodiversity and wildlife. Over the past 30 years 518 sites have been designated as nature reserves which currently total 51 million hectares or over 5 percent of total land area. Three immense reforestation programs are underway including the Three North Shelterbelt, the Yangtse Shelterbelt, and the Coastal Shelterbelt. Plantation approaches to reforestation have dominated forestry strategy in China for several decades. Despite massive planting efforts China's forest resources, especially natural ecosystems, continue to erode. Poor policies are often blamed and criticized for China's failure to extend distinct property rights and clearly delineate management responsibility and benefit sharing arrangements. Frequent policy shifts have also created an environment of uncertainty among forest stakeholders, encouraging short-term exploitation over sustainable production.

Forest management systems in China have gone through some remarkable changes over the past years. Prior to World War II, forests in mountainous regions were owned by landlords, but often under the direct management of poor and lower middle class peasants who exercised almost complete control over the resources. After land reform programs were initiated in the 1950's, farmers were given full ownership, but cooperatives took over management. In the 1960's and 70's, household ownership of forest was assumed by communes and collectives. Finally in 1983, a new forest policy, known as liangshanyidi (freehold land, contracted land, and swidden land), was passed to shift management from the state to individuals, with the collective maintaining ownership. Xu Guozhen of the Central South Forest University of China contends that the policy has failed because the relationships between ownership, management rights and responsibilities, and benefit sharing are unclear.

PUBLIC FOREST LAND POLICY

TRENDS IN ASIA (1800 - 2000)

Economic liberalization policies have also shifted the emphasis on implementation from the state to private enterprise. Deregulation of timber markets followed in 1985. Economic liberalization has also resulted in much greater decentralization in forest policy making toward the provincial level. Provincial policies are attempting to institute better access controls over forest resources, but are competing with a rapidly expanding market-oriented economy that drives exploitation.

The diverse shifts in policies governing forest ownership, use rights, and management authority over the past three decades appear to have created an environment of insecurity among rural people, forestry staff, government administrators, and industry. In some areas, this has undermined willingness to make long-term investments in forestry and has encouraged short-term exploitation and unsustainable use. For example, after a forest management policy shift was made in central Yunnan in the early 1990's, neighboring villages began felling old growth pine forests at night. The entire upper watershed was virtually denuded over a three-year period. Deforestation now threatens the hydrological function of the upper watershed and has eliminated income from pine nuts that had supplemented local community income for generations.

Some of China's largest remaining natural forest areas lie in the mountainous regions of the Southwest. In Yunnan Province, for example, 24 percent of the land is still forested. Along the border with Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Viet Nam, forested mountains are inhabited by ethnic minority groups including Tibetans, Yi, Lisu, Miao, Bai, Yao and other indigenous peoples. Many communities have retained traditional systems of forest management similar to those shared by related ethnic groups across the border. Due to their isolation, political sensitivity, and proximity to border areas, social reorganization policies were not pursued as vigorously as in other parts of China, allowing some traditional organizations to continue to manage local forest resources. The Rural Development Research Center of Yunnan Province is currently documenting the great diversity of indigenous forest user groups that exist within the province and educating foresters and planners in the importance of supporting them through policy and programs. The Center's research also indicates that in agricultural areas farm forestry and plantations managed by individual households have been reasonably successful, while "forest managed by the collectives and townships experienced greatest disturbance and lower productivity". Given the social and ecological complexity and diversity present in China, no monolithic policy will likely respond well to all local forest management needs. Rather, a systematic, long-term, decentralized process of policy formulation that builds on local traditions, needs, and opportunities may offer the best chance for sustaining the nation's forests under growing demographic and industrial pressure.

NEPAL

(Note 4) Nepal's fragile mountain forest ecosystems have been shaped by human interactions for centuries. During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, forest lands were controlled either by local hamlets or by the feudal government of the Rana prime ministers. Nepal was one of the last nations in Asia to nationalize its forests in 1957. At that time the population of the country was around 8.5 million people; today it is nearing 21 million. While the forests of the lowland Terai have long been a target for commercial timber industries, the forests of the middle hills have largely been used to meet the needs of local user communities for agricultural land, housing materials, green manure, fodder, and fuelwood. Nationalization of forest land eroded the legitimacy of indigenous systems of forest protection and management, though local use continued and mounted as populations expanded. The new government that replaced the Rana Regime was often unable to implement effective forest access controls. This resulted in many forests becoming open access lands with subsequent patterns of unsustainable use and degradation. By the late 1970's, Nepali planners and foresters increasingly recognized that the Forest Department alone could not protect the nation's remote forest areas without community co- operation. In 1978, based on the Forest Act of 1961, the Panchayati Forest and Panchayat Protected Forest Rules were passed empowering local village administrators to oversee degraded forest lands. Communities were given rights to all non-forest products and to 50 percent of timber revenues, which was later increased to 75 percent.

The Panchayat forest policies were also supported by the 1982 Decentralization Act. However, by the late 1980's it was clear that community management was not effectively supported through these policy initiatives. An analysis of the program led planners, foresters, NGO leaders and donors to conclude that vesting local government with management rights and responsibilities was a mistake. Local government leaders were often village elite who did not effectively represent the interests of forest users. In 1987, the Community Forestry rules were amended to recognize traditional groups of forest users. Forest User Groups (FUGs) reflected the types of Nepali community organizations that had handled resource management issues in rural society in the past. The new Community Forestry program allows any public forest to be managed by a FUG, with 100 percent of any forest produce accruing to that group. Typically, a Panchayat might have 10 to 15 FUGs. The new FUG policy was incorporated into the Master Plan for the Forestry Sector in 1988, and subsequently strengthened through new Forest Laws and By-Laws passed in the 1993 and 1995.

Currently over 350,000 hectares of public forest are managed by 600,000 households organized into 5,000 FUGs, representing approximately 7 percent of the nation's forest area. Currently, the Forest Department has targeted approximately 61 percent of all public forests for community-based management. While the process of FUG registration progressed slowly during the first few years after the FUG By-Laws were passed in 1987, since 1991 the number of user groups registered has increased dramatically, expanding from 29 in 1990 to 354 in 1992, and finally to 1390 in 1995. Lands designated community forests prior to 1987 have also been brought into conformity with the new legislation.

Formal registration does not fully reflect the broader impact of the program on forest management since tens of thousands of communities are already informally engaged in forest protection and management or have requests for registration pending. Given the current rate of growth in registration and community demand for acknowledgment, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of Nepal's public forest domain will come officially under community control by the year 2010 if current trends prevail.

The empowerment of Forest User Groups has been supported and accelerated by policy measures including: (1) devolving authority to the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) to authorize the transfer process, (2) giving priority to FUGs over other leasehold request for any public forest lands, (3) allowing FUGs 100 percent of all revenues and freedom to allocate surplus revenues for any community development activity, (4) allowing FUGs freedom to set their own prices on forest products, (5) vesting rights to punish forest offenders, and (6) bestowing the authority to transport forest products and develop forest industries.

Aside from officially recognizing community resource users as formal managers, the Forest Department is also undergoing fundamental changes in its orientation. The Master Plan for Forests mandates a conversion of the entire forestry staff to work as extensionists to be carried out through intensive district and regional training programs. The support of development agencies for the reorientation of the Forest Department has been helpful in the case of Nepal.

CAMBODIA

(Note 5) Until recently, Cambodia has possessed dense forest cover. Prior to 1970, 73 percent of the nation was forested. With a population that reached 10 million in 1995, which continues to grow at a rate of 2.8 percent annually, pressures on natural resources are mounting. The political instability of the past 25 years has allowed politically powerful individuals to sell logging rights to local and foreign timber companies. Communities and professional foresters have stood by while powerful political and military figures have sold vast tracts of forests. Accurate figures concerning deforestation are difficult to acquire. While the Mekong Secretariat estimated that 62 percent of the country still retained forest cover in 1993, a 1995 report noted that felling had reduced the coverage to 35 percent of the land area. Estimates of Cambodia's forest area vary widely depending on the inclusion or exclusion of different forest vegetation categories, however all forest inventories show rapidly declining forest cover. The government has at- tempted to pass policies and establish programs to help control deforestation. In April 1995, a timber export ban was passed followed by a ban on felling in early 1996. Yet a later investigation revealed that 750,000 cubic meters of sawn timber were still arriving at Kalapandha harbor in Thailand each year valued at $110 to $220 million 'in a blatantly illegal trade that both the Thai authorities and the Royal Cambodian Government continue to ignore". Despite Thailand's 1995 agreement to close the Cambodian border to the timber trade, corruption within the Thai military and police is alleged to have facilitated the continuing and large flows of wood across the border. The problem is further complicated by the active involvement of two Khmer Rouge factions that are also selling timber in areas under their control that border Thailand.

Deforestation is creating immense problems for the resource-dependent rural population. Still heavily subsistence-oriented, Cambodian villagers rely on forests for housing materials, agricultural tools, fodder, food, medicinal plants, and other needs. Monoculture, fast growing tree plantations that have been the primary strategy for community forestry initiatives have been unsuccessful due to their inability to supply village families with the diverse forest products they require. Communities are showing growing interest in protecting the remaining natural forests.

Cambodia's Forest Department (FD) is now attempting to develop new strategies to stabilize remaining natural forests in two provinces through collaborative agreements with local communities, and with the support of donor agencies. Creating new alliances between the FD and communities is being facilitated by newly emerging NGOs. This process, however, is limited by a continuing reliance on plantation forestry models. Over the next 10 years, however, the FD intends to expand the community forestry program from 2 to 14 districts. Degraded forest estates and secondary forest will be given to local communities under agreement with the FD. Under such agreements the Forest Department would provide technical support and marketing assistance for a wide range of products, while the community would take responsibility for planting, protection, and harvesting. It is currently proposed that under these agreements revenue rights to 80 percent of the produce would be allocated to communities, with the remaining 20 percent for the FD. This approach is currently being tested in 2 districts.

The challenge for Cambodia is to find ways to stabilize its forest resources at a time when powerful figures in both that nation, Thailand, and other countries are profiting heavily from rapid, unsustainable logging. Illegal revenues from timber are considered to be the country's largest source of foreign exchange. Yet, some senior planners recognize their greater value. According to former Finance Minister Sam Rainsy, forests are "the center of the ecosystems. They are like a sponge, soaking up the water in the rainy season and releasing it in the dry season. Already we are seeing an acceleration of erosion, flooding and the siltation of rivers and lakes. We are beginning to starve in the drought and drown in the floods." King Sihanouk has spoken in despair regarding the problem: 'If this deforestation does not stop, Cambodia will be, alas, a desert country in the 21st century." (Note 9)

Donor agencies are frightened too. According to a New York Times article, "The international financial institutions that support half the Government's annual budget, about $650 million, are warning that illegal logging could jeopardize continued financing". In May 1996, the International Monetary Fund suspended a $20 million payment over concern about the government's inability to check illegal logging. Even if senior government officers actively move to halt timber smuggling, stopping it on the ground is another matter since illegal loggers are protected by armed guards. Demand for illegal timber from Cambodia is apparently so strong that even rubber plantations are being felled in some areas.

While it is unlikely that communities vested with rights to public forest management will be able to stop armed gangs supported by the military or Khmer Rouge elements, they may be able to stabilize forest areas where felling is not occurring, or reestablish access controls once illegal logging operators have departed. To build such alliances the Forest Department faces the challenge of creating policies and operational capacities to establish meaningful partnerships with rural communities. Donor agencies appear eager to support this process. The Forest Department has outlined a number of components comprising this strategy including: (1) designating and mapping community forest areas, (2) defining community forest use rights and protection covenants, (3) establishing village committees to administer forest areas (4) determining management rules, regulations, fines, and fees, and (5) allocating income from forest revenues and levying taxes.

VIET NAM

(Note 11) Viet Nam possesses a population of 74 million concentrated in the lowland Red and Mekong River deltas and coastal plains. The remaining two-thirds of the country is hilly and mountainous land, the home of most of the 54 ethnic minority groups who comprise 16 percent of the population. Most of the remaining natural forest is located in these upland areas. Population increases of 1.4 million people per annum (2 percent) and industrial growth averaging 7 to 8 percent annually put immense pressure on the nation's natural resources.

Prior to 1945, most of the upland regions of Viet Nam were sparsely inhabited by ethnic minorities practicing traditional systems of land use. Some communities, like the Thai of the Da River watershed in the north-western part of the country, lived along mountain rivers and engaged in dryland farming, irrigated padi cultivation, and aqua-culture. These groups tended to be more sedentary, often inhabiting the same upland valleys for centuries. Other ethnic minorities like the Hmong lived on higher slopes, relying on long rotation agriculture, periodically moving their settlements. As populations have grown, ethnic minorities and the lowland Kinh majority have come into closer contact. In the past, tribal governance structures and customary laws predominated as methods for managing resources and arbitrating conflicts. The lowland Kinh courts maintained agreements with some upland minority groups, as did the French colonial government, to facilitate trade in certain products and to recruit tribal men for military service. While trade and military contacts between upland communities and lowland governments existed over the centuries, until the end of World War II resource management in the remote upland watersheds of Viet Nam was largely the domain of local communities.

In 1943, out of a total land area of 33 million hectares, Viet Nam had 14.3 million hectares of natural forest covering 43 percent of the land area. By 1993, natural forest cover had fallen to 8.6 million hectares representing 26 percent of the national territory. The remaining land included 12.5 million hectares of denuded hills and open wasteland covering 38 percent of the country, 0.5 million hectares of plantation forest, or 2 percent of the nation, and 11.4 million hectares of farmland covering 34 percent of the country. Viet Nam's forests were degraded through two long wars extending from the 1950's through the mid-1970's. During this period bombing and chemical spraying had considerable impact on reducing forest vegetation. Extensive logging also resulted in substantial forest loss in certain upland regions, and was used to generate timber revenues supporting the war effort. Commercial timber production continued to dominate forest policy through the 1980's to assist the country in resurrecting its economy in the post-war era. Between 1986 and 1989, the forestry sector contributed 2 percent of national income and up to 10 percent of all export earnings according to a Tropical Forestry Action Plan report.

In the late 1950's all land with a slope greater than 25 degrees was subject to transfer to state forest enterprises. The Department of Fixed Cultivation and Sedentarization was established in 1968 to stop swidden cultivation and resettle shifting agriculturists, though this program had limited impact. More successful was the massive National Afforestation Program that resulted in the establishment of 1.4 million hectares of concentrated plantation forest and the scattered planting of 3.6 billion trees between 1961 and 1985. Following the unification of the country in 1975, ambitious government programs resettled between 2 to 4 million lowland ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) into the upland "new economic zone" areas, many of whom worked in state forest enterprises. Forest policies began to shift in 1982, with forest lands increasingly allocated to farmer households, villages, and communes for management. This process was boosted by the official adoption of the national "renovation" (doi moi) program in 1986, oriented toward economic liberalization. Government decisions to accelerate the transfer of public forest lands to individuals, farmer households, and communes gained further momentum after 1993. According to a Ministry of Forestry report, by 1990 4.4 million hectares of land had been allocated to 473,500 households, 2638 communes, and 7442 cooperatives.

While privatization has been successful in encouraging lowland and midland farmers, well-connected to markets and capital, to plant fast-growing trees and establish plantations, these new policies have been less successful in mobilizing community and household tree planting in the nation's remote mountainous regions. Policies remain largely insensitive to indigenous resource use systems of upland minorities and to their prior claims and rights to the land. Much of Viet Nam's deforestation, estimated at 300,000 hectares annually between 1973 and 1985, occurs in the uplands. Continuing in-migration by lowland populations, small-scale logging, fires, and unsustainable land use systems drive deforestation. Deforestation has also led to increasing erosion and sediment loads in major river systems. In the Da River, which flows through northwest Viet Nam, increasing silt levels may reduce the life of the Hoa Binh dam from 100 to 50 years. The dam supplies 70 percent of the nation's hydroelectric power.

Since indigenous systems of forest protection and management practiced by ethnic minority groups receive little recognition under the law, they have not been effectively integrated into broader national strategies to stabilize upland resources. Current policies emphasize privatization or contractual management of upper forests, but an individual household's decision making may not reflect the interests of the larger community. Vietnamese planners and professional foresters, encouraged by development agencies and experiences elsewhere in Asia, are considering ways to engage communities in the management of upper watershed forests. Many forests in upper catchments have been held under communal management in the past because they provide water to the irrigated rice fields and fish ponds that are located on the lower water course and stream sides. While de facto indigenous systems are present to varying degrees, there is no clear national village forest management policy or instruments to complement emerging household forest management programs.

Forest allocation to households is a slow process as it requires cadastral maps be made through ground surveys to demarcate areas for contractual agreements. There is a need to develop strategies that maintain and enhance local tenure stability, supporting existing, informal forest protection and management systems, until such groups are formally registered, whether they be household or community administered. International and bilateral development and research agencies need to coordinate efforts to assist Vietnamese forestry institutions to gain the skills and develop the capacities to cooperate effectively with communities engaged in forest management activities. Evolving strategies need to build on and be responsive to a diversity of upland physical and cultural contexts, supporting and strengthening ethnic minority institutions and forest production systems, rather than importing lowland or foreign models. Recent discussions and meetings among Vietnamese planners, foresters, and donor-supported upland project staff are valuable and need to be sustained to accelerate learning and facilitate the evolution of effective community forest management policies and programs.

INDIA

(Note 13) India was one of the first nations in the world to establish a professional forest service and nationalize its forest domain under the Forest Act of 1865. During the next 100 years much of the country's uncultivated land was demarcated and placed under the management of the Indian Forest Service and state forest departments. Throughout this period forests were viewed as the primary supplier of timber which was used to lay the foundation for India's vast railroads, build towns and cities, truck frames, and deliver fuel for industrial and domestic needs. Tribal communities and other forest dwellers' resource rights eroded as state agencies and the private sector established greater control. Protests and rebellions by resident peoples were generally quickly suppressed by the military or police, though conflicts persisted through the years. After independence, much of the British colonial forest policy and administrative system was retained. The need for the newly independent nation to develop its economy led to accelerated commercial exploitation after World War II.

By 1980, however, concerns over rapidly disappearing forest cover and wildlife led to the passing of the Forest Conservation Act placing tight restrictions on timber felling. Yet, while wildlife conservation needs were becoming a national priority, it was not until the National Forest Policy Act of 1988 was passed that community forest use rights were given greater recognition. By the early 1990's, while 23 percent of India's land area was designated public forest, only 9 to 11 percent possessed good forest vegetative cover. State forest lands were under immense pressure from tens of millions of livestock and an estimated 50 to 200 million rural forest users. Planners and forest officers recognized the need to intensify forest protection through involving communities. At the same time, NGO staff, university researchers and field-level foresters were identifying a growing number of Indian communities that were protecting natural forests in response to increasing scarcities of forest products. Concentrated in the eastern Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, but also found in the Himalayas, southern Rajasthan, and the Western and Eastern Ghats, thousands of villages had taken control of designated, often degraded public forest lands allowing them to begin regenerating naturally. In 1990 the national Ministry of Environment and Forests passed a resolution extending specific rights and responsibilities to villages over the public forest domain. Over the past nine years, seventeen Indian states issued government orders with guidelines for the implementation of Joint Forest Management (JFM) schemes. By the mid-1990's, $150 million (30 percent of all donor support to the forestry sector) had been earmarked to support JFM. It is currently estimated that 20,000 villages have formed forest protection groups, many of which effectively control access to 3 to 5 percent of India's total forest area representing approximately 2 million hectares.

The challenge for India now is to continue the transition process. Nearly 50 percent of India's land area, 67 million hectares, is considered ecologically degraded. Much of the country's forest degradation results from expanding human and livestock populations unsustainably collecting biomass in the form of timber, leaves, shrubs, and grasses. The removal of vegetative cover allows rain and wind to carry valuable top soil away. Tighter controls over resource access and exploitation are critical to sustaining and restoring India's natural forest ecosystems. Local users' recognition of this need is growing, reflecting the accelerating rate of grassroots organizing and forest protection group formation; however, it remains concentrated in certain regions. That community forest protection is often a locally initiated action presents challenges to government. It requires a departure from conventional top-down project delivery schemes. Government agencies are confronted by social processes that they must respond to, facilitate, and support. Roles required of field staff are shifting from that of custodial guards and private sector logging regulators, to community organizers, mappers, mediators, participatory researchers, and extension educators. Technically-oriented timber working plans are now being replaced by community generated, multi-product micro-plans. These are the challenges facing the creation of new partnerships between rural communities and government agencies to oversee the public forest domain.

Can India's forest departments shift to collaborative forms of management after over a century of unilateral custodial control? With over 100,000 staff, the reorientation required is certainly dramatic. Ajit Banejee noted that if you read the professional books of 1950's and 60's you will find virtually no mention of community roles in forest management, while today it is in the mainstream of Indian forestry. Nonetheless, in-service staff training capacities and action oriented field research abilities are inadequate and require urgent attention. Already, it is India's massive rural population that determines the conditions of much of the country's natural forests. While the Government initially approved JFM only in degraded forest areas, there is greater recognition that community involvement is necessary in all forested areas, including protected areas and those with valuable timber.

INDONESIA

(Note 15) Community-based forest management is a fundamental element in many of Indonesia's human ecosystems. From Irian Jaya to northern Sumatra, indigenous communities utilize and protect neighboring forests, relying on them for a sustainable supply of land, timber, non-timber forest products, and as watersheds. Many groups manipulate these forests intensively to optimize certain product flows, such as the mixed, talun forestry systems of West Java, the damar forests of South Sumarta, the coastal sago groves of Eastern Indonesia, and the rattan gardens of Kalimantan.

During Dutch colonial rule, forest land began to be placed under government control. Initially, the teak forests of Java were brought under the authority of state corporations in the mid-19th century. In the 1920's, agrarian laws recognized private ownership only over permanently cultivated land, while communal forms of forest tenure received little attention. After Indonesia achieved independence following World War II, new land and forest laws were passed, but many drew heavily on earlier Dutch laws. Traditional community forest rights were acknowledged under the Basic Forestry Law (1967) and the Basic Agrarian Law (1960 ), but only as long as they did not conflict with broader "national development interests."

By the early 1970's, Indonesia began embarking on a period of rapid industrial growth driven by the utilization of its rich natural resource base. Vast areas in the outer islands of Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Irian Jaya were leased to foreign and domestic corporations for logging, mining, and plantation use. Development agencies began pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars to finance the transmigration of Javanese to remote areas to establish new agricultural zones. The land and forest rights of resident peoples were generally not recognized throughout this period. Unmapped ancestral land claims had little credence in government circles and there were few channels to communicate conflicts to judicial or administrative authorities. Government policies gave priority to private sector and development program initiatives.

By the late 1980's, however, conflicts with forest communities on Java led government agencies to begin designing more collaborative, social forestry initiatives. New co-management agreements were crafted to provide forest farmers with some long-term rights to grow fruit and timber tree species on public lands. On the larger outer islands, new community forest management policies and supportive programs have only recently begun to emerge. The Ministry of Forestry has required timber concessionaires to implement community development projects under the HPH Bina Desa program, though these programs generally have modest results and do not deal directly with forest tenure rights and conflicts of resident peoples. The government has encouraged migrants to plant fast-growing timber species on public lands under the HTI-Trans program. Other community development strategies have also emerged for forest dwellers, now estimated between 12 and 60 million people. These include the Forest Village Community Development Program (PMDH) and the Forest Community project (Hutan Kemasyarakatan). Specialists monitoring community forestry policy shifts in Indonesia feel that such efforts have been flawed due to a lack of attention to fundamental forest rights and tenure conflicts. The Ministry of Forestry has yet to develop a clear mechanism to re-empower communities with legal rights over neighboring forest lands. Without long-term tenure security, there is concern that outside interests will continue to exploit local forest resources without regard for community needs for forest materials and a healthy environment.

While Indonesian NGOs and bilateral donor agencies are supporting a range of pilot project initiatives to explore options for transferring legal management authority to forest resident groups, much of the work is at a pilot project level. Further learning tends to be scattered and there has been limited attempt to synthesize the work of the past decade to develop long-term strategies to engage rural communities in public forest management partnerships. The Minister of Forestry has, however, indicated a willingness to accelerate work in the development of community forest management systems. Under the proposed village production forest block program (persil hutan produksi desa) communities would be granted management rights to public production forest lands without ties to a timber corporation or other intermediary body. The Ministry of Forests is especially interested in implementing this program to stabilize forest lands that fall outside existing lease or program areas. Many logged-over patches of forest, ranging in size from 10,000 to 15,000 hectares, currently have few or no access controls due to the limited availability of forest guards and patrols. As a consequence they often experience illegal logging by local entrepreneurs. Communities, in conjunction with NGOs, are now being viewed by Ministry planners as well-positioned to oversee such small- to medium-sized forest tracts. The challenge is to design and establish a process that brings together forest communities, local government, provincial planning agencies and national Ministries to initiate this management transition and devolution of authority.

THAILAND

(Note 16) Thailand has experienced extensive deforestation over the past century, accelerating in the post World War II era. As recently as 1953, 60 percent of the nation was forested. However, forest cover had declined to 27 percent by 1991. In the mid-1960's, 40 percent of the north fell under timber concessions. Migration and land clearing for cassava and kenaf cultivation in the Northeast during the 1970's resulted in rapid deforestation. Between the 1960's and the present time Thailand went from a net timber exporter to a major regional importer, now drawing heavily on wood from Burma, Laos, and Cambodia.

Prior to the establishment of the Royal Forestry Department (RFD) of Thailand in 1896, the nation's forest lands were broadly under the control of autonomous local nobility and rural communities. Thailand has a long history of communal forest and water resource management. In the northern part of the country, indigenous water management organizations (Moung Fai) operated irrigation systems and guarded the watersheds that supplied them. In other parts of Thailand, local community organizations protected forested sacred watersheds, groves, and shelterbelts. In 1899, the national government formally claimed ownership of all forest lands, ultimately representing approximately 60 percent of the national land area. After nationalization, the RFD adopted a modem, technical concept of forestry, emphasizing commercial silviculture under bureaucratic and private sector control. Community systems of management continued to operate, but without formal sanction, often coming into conflict with government policies. Over the past 20 years the RFD has gradually opened to allow greater community collaboration. For example, when the RFD established a water- shed management program in 1953, the orientation was solely toward soil and water conservation trials on research stations. Beginning in 1977, however, watershed projects began addressing local economic needs. Experience gained from early efforts led RFD in 1992 to formulate watershed management strategies that explicitly engage forest-dependent communities. While meaningful partnerships are now beginning to emerge, the RFD continues to face problems due to contradictions between old and ongoing policies and innovative, participatory strategies. For example, community forest resources are often located in steep upland watershed zoned for strict conservation making the negotiation of community use rights difficult. Complex conflicts over water access also create divisive issues, generating barriers to compromise agreements. Communities that protect upland forest watersheds to ensure water security for downstream users are not adequately compensated for their management work, reflecting a broader inequity of resource flows between upstream people and downstream consumers.

Government policies need to be formulated to support both hamlet and community (tambon) management of forest and water resources. In 1991 a new community forestry law was drafted, but was not ratified by the government. Successive changes of government and political factionalism have slowed efforts to adopt a formal resolution or establish a national strategy. At more local levels, however, changes are occurring. In the North, some communities in upland watersheds are developing collaborative resource management systems. Ethnic minority groups are concerned about land insecurity, deforestation and erosion, and declining water quality. In northern districts, villages sharing the same sub-watershed have begun framing rules and organizing management systems, sometimes with the sup- port of local RFD staff, NGO, or university researchers. As population and economic development pressures generate pollution problems and increased consumption, water is becoming a critical issue in both rural and urban areas. Rural and urban-based environmental movements may join forces to place greater pressure on the political system to extend management rights and responsibilities to local communities.

PHILIPPINES

(Note 17) Over 90 percent of the Philippines is thought to have possessed forest cover prior to the colonial period in the 16th century. By 1900, forested area had declined to 70 percent, falling to 55 percent in 1950, with an accelerated slide to 20 percent by 1990. After independence, colonial policies persisted that had nationalized nearly two-thirds of the country and designated it state forest land. At that time, the Philippine government viewed forest inhabitants, whether migrant or indigenous, as squatters with few or no rights to the land. Technical justifications were given to support policies prohibiting human habitation in watersheds with slopes greater than 18 percent, representing much of the uplands. Powerful economic interests received political and administrative support to exploit natural resources in the uplands, with large mining and logging leases granted to urban elite. At the height of the logging era in the early 1970's, nearly 400 Timber License Agreements (TLAs) were active. Logging companies also established roads opening the uplands to a flood of lowland migrants. The lack of any land reform, the recession and the collapse of the sugar and coconut industries, only exacerbated the problems in the years that followed, while unsustainable logging practices continued to reduce old growth areas. Ongoing armed resistance to some of the remaining TLAs reflect the still desperate need for alternatives.

While populist "land for the landless" programs emerged in the 1960's, they conflicted with rigid policies and punitive actions against up- land communities practicing long rotational agriculture (Kaingin). By the 1970's forest occupants involved in management, started to be acknowledged both by government and the private sector. The Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines, Inc. (PICOP) sought to facilitate forest rehabilitation by encouraging neighboring farmers to plant trees. The government also began to recognize community claims and their de facto role in management, initiating a range of supportive pilot projects using donor support throughout the 1980's. While pilot projects had little impact on mainstream public forest management, policies and practices, they initiated a learning process that began identifying a very different approach to upland management. Pilot projects identified the limitations of "technical fixes" including the slope agriculture land technology (SALT) being extended in the northern part of the country. Action research also indicated that farmers were rejecting second tree farm rotations under the PICOP program. An Upland Development Working Group was established with donor support. Drawing on pilot project experience it provided a new process-oriented mechanism for the design of community-based forestry programs.

The new Constitution of 1987 clearly acknowledges the inalienable rights of the cultural communities of the uplands and has strengthened the political will to make meaningful policy changes and extend to resident people operational management rights for public forests. Senior administrators in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) have taken bold steps in canceling TLAs, with the strong support of the environmental NGO lobby. Yet, progress in devolving management to community groups has been slow due to the fragmented nature of earlier CFM programs emerging from a diversity of donor and government projects over the preceding two decades. In 1994 a national conference was held on community-based forest management (CBFM) seeking a consensus on a broad national strategy to reform forest management. In November 1996 CBFM replaced commercial forestry as the primary approach to upland management by the DENR under the national Social Reform Agenda. Commercial management practices still continue with the conversion of some logging concessions to Industrial Forest Management Agreements, but on a guarded scale.

CBFM is now confronted by operational issues as it seeks to implement its national mandate. These include defining the new role of the private sector, the role of communities in protected areas, securing funding for social preparation, government training and reorientation requirements, establishing strong partnerships between local government and the DENR, and creating functional monitoring and evaluation systems. The DENR now seeks methods to draw local government and NGOs into a process of dialogue with communities that will allow millions of hectares of upland forests to be systematically brought under community management in the coming decade.

COMMUNITY FOREST MANAGEMENT ISSUES

Transforming public forest management systems to enable greater community involvement is a complex and long-term process. The legacy of a century of bureaucratic, private sector industrial dominance is established policies, procedures, and attitudes that often alienate and disempower rural people in their relationship to forest resources. Part II examines changes underway in many Asian nations that attempt to link governments and communities within the context of forest management. The discussions presented here highlight issues raised during the Asia Forest Network meeting's topical panels and sub-group deliberations. Meeting participants agreed that necessary elements for successful management transitions include enabling policies, supportive donor action, systematic agency reorientation, new communication channels, innovative tools for planning, and participatory decision-making processes. Not only do these elements need to be present, they require linkages that make them mutually reinforcing and informing. Government and donor strategies that guide management transitions must design and synchronize actions in ways that reflect capacities of forest departments, NGOs, communities and other stakeholder groups. Adopting a process perspective that identifies phases of change and transition points, using benchmarks and indicators to track progress and identify constraints, may help gauge a country's progress in decentralizing forest management.

POLICY

(Note 18) In the past 10 years Asian government forestry organizations, often encouraged by development agencies, issued orders and created new community forestry programs. Social scientists, NGO activists, and lawyers sought new legal instruments that could extend formal rights and responsibilities to communities to manage public forest lands. The community forestry policy environment in Asia is currently a complex mix of precedent-setting projects, program guidelines, and government orders; a few countries have significantly changed their national forest laws. While most community forestry policy-related actions appear well-intentioned, they have generally had limited national impact. This results in part from inappropriate policy formulation and a failure to address implementation needs.

While enabling policies are an important component in empowering communities as partners in public forest lands management, they only support significant management transitions when linked with new tenure instruments, staff reorientation efforts and community extension programs. Policy failures can result from poor design, reflected in a lack of key elements, misplaced authority structures, and inappropriate financing. Policy design flaws are due to an inadequate understanding of the forces underlying deforestation. New policies are also adopted for political purposes, but can run counter to informal policies, attitudes, or procedures that support the status quo. Policies can also be unsuccessful because they are never actively implemented due to an absence of political will or lack of operational plans.

Part I of this report details evolving community forest policies in Asian countries. It indicates the growing prevalence of innovative programs and policy instruments which convey greater formal recognition to communities in managing public land. The emergence of community forest management (CFM) programs and policies in the region over the past one or two decades is significant in reversing a century-old trend toward greater state control. These new policies, while often highly tentative and limited in meaningful rights, are significant in sending a new message to government officials and forest department staff. New policies supporting land reform and local governance also indicate broader political support for decentralization and local empowerment.

Nepal and the Philippines, the first Asian nations to endorse community forest management policies in the mid-1970's, had to repeatedly revise their policies to make them more responsive to ground-level realities. Indian forest departments in states like West Bengal and Orissa, which were first to embark meaningfully toward joint forest management, have revised their policies two or three times over the past 8 years in response to field experience. Initial national and local JFM policies have been cautiously extending a limited range of rights to community groups. Government orders and resolutions are often restricted to degraded areas, lower value forest products, short or uncertain time frames, and they possess escape clauses for government agencies, providing little protection to communities under the law. JFM guidelines are often unnecessarily rigid and prescriptive regarding the structure, membership and responsibilities of community forest management organizations and their duties and ties to local government. Fortunately, planners appear to be learning from experience and adapting their policies and strategies. Some recent CFM policies include greater resource rights in the form of complete control over forest products, longer and clearer tenure periods, and stronger recourse to judicial power.

WHAT'S WORKING

What seems to be working in CFM policy making is the process of continuously reshaping policies in response to operational experience and field-level feedback. In India, NGOs are translating CFM policies into local languages and holding meetings with community forest protection groups to discuss and critique new policies and programs. Recommendations from such public fora are channeled back to forest department planners and are used in developing new policies. In the Philippines, the national working group visits sites around the country to hold meetings with community members, agency staff, and local government officials to identify constraints to CFM program implementation. Donor agencies, NGOs, and foresters in Nepal have interacted informally for years to push forward more progressive policy development. In Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, China, and Cambodia emphasis on farm forestry still dominates programs and policy orientation. However, researchers and development agencies are drawing attention to the importance of upland community resource management systems and are gaining experience through pilot programs, reflecting an earlier phase of policy transition.

WHAT'S NOT WORKING

In most Asian countries, policy reforms must be driven by political leaders. Unfortunately, these individuals often have little understanding of field-level conditions or agency problems. As a consequence, they usually have limited capacity to develop effective policy strategies to respond to challenges presented by the public sector. In addition, few countries possess mechanisms to pool and synthesize existing experience and access community and professional knowledge to guide policy development. Finally, development agencies remain primarily concerned with their own assistance activities and generally fail to respond to broader sectoral needs. Inter-agency coordination is unusual and long-term cooperative strategy development is virtually unknown.

KEY POLICY MAKING REQUIREMENTS

Policies are improved when developed with broad-based participation drawing on field experiences.

Policies are best developed in a transparent manner through a process involving public participation.

Policies should be structured to allow them to be modified regularly to respond to operational experience.

Policies must have political support to facilitate implementation.

Policies should be integrated and coordinated with implementation strategies.

Policies should be translated and communicated to government staff and the public in local languages.

Policies must acknowledge and support programs that create capacities for their implementation.

Policy implementation needs to be synchronized with agency reorientation, staff training and the establishment of new procedures.

Policies need to be informed by development agency, who in turn support their implementation.

REORIENTATION OF FORESTRY AGENCIES

Since the late 1980's the timber and revenue generating orientation of many of Asia's forest agencies has slowly been giving way to a greater emphasis on community involvement in the production of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). These changes are significant because they may reflect a shift away from the Western commercial timber production models that have dominated the region for the past 50 years. Forestry professionals are recognizing the need to make management systems compatible with local forest use practices and indigenous institutions.

Professional forestry in many Asia nations was founded on 19th-century systems developed in Prussia for temperate forests. The "scientific forestry" introduced in India in the 1850's and later in other countries attempted to replace indigenous management practices, often displacing relatively stable relationships that forest dwellers enjoyed with the forests. After independence there was little change in forest policies and administrative practices. Most conflicts have arisen because of disputes between state foresters and local people over the right to forest lands and tree tenure. After several decades of social forestry programs, Asian forestry agencies are gaining familiarity with working cooperatively with communities. Political pressures are also pushing for greater decentralization of public forest management. While an increasing number of foresters see community collaboration as the fundamental public forest management system of the future, most forestry agencies are resistant to change. Meeting participants suggested some areas where benchmark indicators could be developed to monitor and inform forest agency transitions.

BENCHMARKS FOR TRANSITION

While forest management transitions are underway in Asia, few benchmarks, or indicators, are available to measure progress in passing from state to community control of forest resources. This transition can have three broad stages including: (1) an initial period allowing community involvement in protection of state forests, (2) communities entering into partnerships with the state in production management, and (3) communities gaining actual ownership of the resource with the state monitoring the overall use of the land. Meeting participants attempted to identify some basic parameters for benchmarks with the hope that foresters, social scientists, and institutional specialists will work on specific, measurable indicators of change in the future. Some of the broad indicators identified by the group were changes in the control over the resource, sustainability of transition, changes in the resource base, social and gender equity, organizational changes to reflect transition, and staff orientation of FDs. The group felt the indicators should be kept simple for use by forest departments and local communities. The following considerations were also discussed.

FROM STATE TO COMMUNITY: TRANSITIONS IN FOREST CONTROL

Stage 1: PROTECTION The state plays a dominant role by controlling the ownership and management of the resource. Community is entrusted with the protection of the forest in return for a share of the final benefits.

Stage 2: MANAGEMENT The state and community become partners in the management of the resource. The state continues to own the resource, but the final benefits are shared equally.

Stage 3: OWNERSHIP The community gains ownership of the resource, though not of the land. The state establishes the rules, monitors the implementation of these rules, and maintains some form of control.

FOREST DEPARTMENT STAFF ORIENTATION

The process of reorienting FD staff has been slow and should be accelerated. Conventional attitudes and the scale of staff reorientation requirements presents barriers to the management transition. "It is not easy for 20,000 DENR personnel to change their traditional role as forest regulators overnight", despite the Philippines government's political commitment to change which states: "People first and the forests will follow". In Indonesia, the revenue orientation among the 50,000 staff of the State Forest Corporation (Perum Perhutani) remains, despite public support for community forestry. For India, retraining 150,000 FD staff is a gigantic enterprise, but it has begun, albeit modestly. Orissa reports that the reorientation is working. Four hundred foresters have been trained in behavioral skills, gender issues, and JIM; 15,000 villagers and local officials have attended amass training"; and strategic training plans are being drawn up for the state's forest officers to "develop a positive attitude towards people's participation." All four World Bank supported forestry projects in India have provisions for "institutional development studies" to encourage organizational reform and staff reorientation.

Nepal took a decisive step in reclassifying all forest officers as extensionists. However, the district forest officers are unable to cope with community pressure to register user groups. Some 10,000 applications for registration are pending because of staff shortages, which "highlights the need for capacity building and reorganization' within the FD to "accommodate new... demands that will be generated because of community forestry". In China and Viet Nam, agency reorientation to giver greater emphasis to community forestry is unlikely at present due to state policies favoring privatization. However, Cambodia has shown interest in community participation and is experimenting with two projects in two provinces. Many forestry staff remain unconvinced of the benefits of community forestry to themselves and to their organization. Overcoming these psycho-logical constraints, is often more important than providing technical skills, and should be the main focus of future training. In India, the 150 years of colonial and "scientific forestry" traditions permeates the forestry establishment; this has inhibited community forestry from becoming the principal management paradigm. Within the forest departments, inadequate career opportunities for FD staff who work with communities, failure to promote by merit, inadequate female staff, a spirit of "insulation and isolation," limited financial support, and a bureaucratic inertia to change were all identified as internal constraints. Indicators and benchmarks are needed to plan strategies and monitor progress in removing these barriers and creating an environment that facilitates agency transitions.

ENHANCING DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT AGENCY PROGRAMS

(Note 21) Improving the effectiveness of development agency support programs requires the attention of all involved, including implementing agencies and "beneficiary groups". While development support agencies (who provide loans) and donors agencies (who give grants) have very different modes of operation, scales of activities, and responsibilities, both could benefit from greater participant review and integration of field learning. There is a need to internalize learning from mistakes and problems as well as from successes. Greater effectiveness requires that greater collective attention be given to project design experiences, indicators, evaluations and other learning. AFN meeting participants generally agreed that it was important for development agencies to view their forestry sector work as part of a broader social change process, rather than solely as time-bound, target-driven projects. National and regional fora are also needed to coordinate the activities of different development agencies and relate these initiatives to emerging national policies and international environmental strategies. Meeting participants identified a number of questions concerning the role of support agencies in enabling policy and operational changes.

KEY QUESTIONS FOR DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT AGENCIES

Who participates in assistance program design and monitoring?

How to respond to larger social process needs in project design?

What donor strategies most effectively support organizational change?

How to recognize when a shift from hardware assistance to software is required?

How to establish more flexible budgeting and provide less restrictive project time frames?

How to ensure that funds appropriately reach communities and provide long-term benefit?

How to enable growth in knowledge and attitudes that are sustainable beyond the project?

How does project-level learning link to policy formulation?

What role should agencies/donors play in enabling government change?

How can agencies/donors more effectively contribute to international learning?

How can donor and agency funded activities coordinate more effectively?

What sort of donor exchange forums are workable?

ONGOING DESIGN PROCESS

Development assistance agencies are increasingly aware of the need to shift from doing projects for communities to facilitating change within communities. This reorientation requires a broadening of the project concept, including who participates in their design. If donors are to support capacity building within government agencies and community institutions, they need to shift their performance criteria from quantitative outputs to more abstract indicators such as effectiveness in resolving problems, responsiveness, and adaptability. With a greater focus on process comes an acceptance of the need to integrate learning and sustain creative thinking beyond the design stage. By emphasizing adaptation throughout the life of an assistance project, it is more likely a project will be able to respond successfully to emerging problems.

HARDWARE TO SOFTWARE

In many nations the social forestry projects of the 1970's and 80's stressed investment in hardware comprising seedlings, nurseries, buildings, and vehicles. This approach implied a need for increased revenue from the plantations to justify investments. Community forestry strategies emerging in Asia are shifting the emphasis to natural ecosystem restoration by transferring the legal authority and institutional capacities to rural groups to protect natural forest, requiring a organizational reorientation of forestry departments. Investments in software, such as in-service training, forestry colleges, and community extension programs are urgently required.

ACCOUNTABILITY TO COMMUNITIES AND IMPLEMENTING AGENCIES

Community forest management strategies require the active collaboration of development agencies as partners in facilitating long-term policy and operational changes affecting the public forest domain. Donor ability to work closely and responsively with implementing agencies maybe frustrate d by demands on project managers to respond to priorities and pressures from home governments. Senior administrators and politicians half a world away may demand proof of effectiveness, with little understanding of local contexts or long-term strategies developed collaboratively by do- nor project staff, implementing agency personnel, and community groups. In such contexts, project staff are faced with conforming to the program priorities of their home offices and demonstrating their effectiveness to their own administrators, rather than giving emphasis to what is valued by the beneficiary.

SUSTAINING INVESTMENT IMPACT

Greater attention is now being given to methods to build community management capabilities, allowing them to sustain activities beyond project support. This implies adopting strategies which identify and support local initiatives, ones that are responsive rather than directive. Past investments in social forestry plantations often disappeared when the fast-growing species were felled. New approaches emphasizing institution-building aspire to assist communities to establish or strengthen resource management systems that can sustain themselves indefinitely, ensuring the environmental functions of forests and watersheds while generating secure income flows. Such strategies are more likely to succeed if policies, local government, and communities are working in a coordinated manner. Development assistant agencies that wish to work with social change processes must reflect the time frames in which change is occurring, rather than adopting an arbitrary project period. Sustaining support through critical transitions may be more important than the volume of financing transferred.

MONITORING IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT

Project indicators of success are often based on a quantitative accomplishment that does not reflect the quality of a program's impact. More thought needs to be given to criteria for defining success, and to participatory reviews with implementing agencies and community groups. The experience of the National Irrigation Administration in the Philippines indicates that engaging communities in monitoring program implementation can also increase efficiency. When user groups were obligated to match a proportion of project costs and given veto power over spending decisions, implementation costs came down substantially.

LEARNING MECHANISMS

The lack of effective coordination and sharing of experience among donor agencies was identified as a significant problem at the Asia Forest Network meeting. New mechanisms are required that bring donor agencies together to discuss effective ways to program assistance and work with governments and NGOs. At the national and regional level there must be more detailed dialogue among donors regarding strategies supportive of forest management transitions. Many donors have not fully utilized lessons learned from social forestry programs and plantations they funded in the 1970's and 80's to more effectively redesign their strategies for the 1990's and beyond. Learning regarding what works well and what does not remains scattered among development assistance agencies, rather than being shared, synthesized and integrated into contemporary programming.

The need to reduce duplication and to build on one another's activities is obvious but not easily achieved without a growth in trust and concrete modes for collaboration. Better coordination among donors and governments to discuss national priorities would likely improve the effective-ness of support to the forestry sector. Greater involvement of government staff in development agency program design, through discussion fora and interactive processes, would also build a stronger sense of national ownership of projects.

Informal fora seem to work best, allowing open discussion of common issues and problems. In Nepal, where an active inter-agency forum has functioned for some time, meetings have progressed with greater information sharing and have led to collaborative action and even joint decisions concerning necessary directions for national policy. In the Philippines, working group visits to different sites provide opportunities to listen to communities, and to local and regional government staff perceptions about the effectiveness of new policies and programs. This process brings the group of donors and government officials to a closer understanding of the utility of current development strategies and constraints. This in turn allows for more rapid programmatic changes to be made to respond to local conditions and needs.

COMMUNITIES

(Note 22) AFN meeting participants identified a number of fundamental political and economic conditions that undermine community involvement in forest management. Inequities in resource flows and authority delegation represent major obstacles to the transfer of management responsibilities to remote small forest-dependent groups.

RESOURCE FLOWS

In most nations, development plans have relied on upland watersheds and forest lands to provide raw materials, taxes/fees, and hydropower to initiate and finance economic development in urban centers and prime lowland agricultural areas. National governments have tended to consider forest regions as vast banks of stored resources that can be successfully managed, owned and exploited or protected according to the requirements of the state. Forest-dependent communities have been largely viewed as a source of labor. In some countries, governments have even viewed them as transitory populations and have labeled them illegal occupants. Modes of public forest management have relied on larger private sector corporations and companies that are empowered through leasing and contractual agreements to exploit the resource to achieve economic goals. Regulatory mechanisms, however, have failed to ensure the sustainable use of public forests under private sector management. Administrative failures and political pressures have limited government ability to capture revenues from logging, reducing financing available for investment in the resource use. As a consequence, communities have been disempowered in their management role and have been left to stand by and watch their resource base rapidly exploited to benefit urban populations, while experiencing little reverse flow of development capital into their region.

Urban-centered governments and commercial interests have established a resource flow that is inherently inequitable, with minimal investment from all sectors returning to upland watersheds and forest lands. Special projects that acknowledge the existence of communities in these state-owned areas are channeled through government implementing agencies. The limited funds targeted for forest communities are largely absorbed to support the costs of forest departments and local government involvement, often with minimal resources actually reaching affected communities.

Ecologically, the downstream regions are now paying for this lack of real investments. Hydroelectric power and irrigation water shortages caused by reduced hydrological function, dam silting, and regular flooding of productive lowlands are providing a basis to re-think these inequities. While the attention of urban and lowland agricultural populations is increasingly drawn to upland changes and the need for better policies and programs to ensure that downstream environmental services are delivered, government response capacity is limited. Governments are constrained by limited financial resources, by limited capacity to deliver them effectively, and by a reluctance to acknowledge the management rights and roles that forest communities have played in the past and will need to play in the future. The ability of Asia's rural communities to mobilize and invest human and capital resources in sustainably productive forest and water management has, and continues to be, grossly undervalued. New processes and mechanisms for forming partnerships between government agencies and forest communities could unleash new resources and provide a framework for collaborative action. It will require, however, immense political will to overcome established attitudes, vested interests, and trends that support earlier images of forest and upland regions as targets for resource extraction. It will require not only a rebalancing of resource flows, but changes in the flow and allocation of authority.

AUTHORITY FLOWS

For centuries forest communities and upland hamlets in much of Asia remained relatively isolated from lowland government influence. Communities managed natural resources with authority generated by their own cultural traditions and membership. With the expansion of the nation state during the 19th and 20th centuries, community authority has been systematically eroded. In many countries, communities still have either no or inadequate legal authority to manage local forest lands. At the same time, the local governance possess limited ability to establish ground-level resource use controls. Government representatives frequently have difficulties getting out of their offices and talking with forest user groups. Re- mote communities also face immense problems in gaining representation within government decision-making processes.

A significant finding that emerged from the Asia Forest Network meeting was that while most countries in the region delegate governance authority down to the administrative village level, actual forest management practice often occurs among smaller, sub-village-level hamlets. Administrative villages are often arbitrary groupings of many smaller settlements. The larger, wealthier communities, often situated on the road, tend to control government projects and are the seat of administrative decision-making. In other words, formal authority stops at the end of the road where operational forest management begins.

Where countries are devolving power to these administrative villages, such as Filipino barangay, Thai tambon, Indonesian desa dinas, or Indian gaon panchayat, the central government assumes that these administrative village leaders understand local forest needs and management priorities and will effectively reflect the interests of local user groups. Agencies and donors follow suit and assume that by working with these units they will represent the needs of primary forest dependents. Reports from the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, and India clearly challenge these assumptions. From a sociological perspective, administrative villages are often government-defined constructs dominated by the most powerful socio-economic groups within the cluster of communities. Larger villages, often with greater land and capital assets, capture the political structure and authority.

This leaves more remote, smaller forest communities marginalized. Forest communities maybe comprised of indigenous peoples in a process of retreat, with migrants from lowland cultural groups taking over the local economy and occupying political power centers in key villages and township. In such cases, government authority transfers to administrative villages may further undermine the authority of forest communities, generating rather than reducing conflict.

Primary forest dependents reside in or on the forest line in smaller marginalized settlements. They rely on informal institutions to provide leadership and decisions for collective action. Most interaction with the formally recognized village governance centers occurs through taxation, political elections, or trade. Few countries maintain information regarding the location and activities of hamlet-based forest communities. Government development funds tend to stop at the administrative village's political center. Forest hamlets are left with no authority, few assets, limited assistance, and larger, more powerful neighbors who are gaining authority through government policies and programs.

India and Nepal are developing participatory forest management policies that directly recognize and support forest user groups as managers. Forest user groups in Nepal are gaining new authority through contractual agreements directly with national forest agencies. Forest-dependent hamlets are also evolving new organizational structures, including federations and coordinating apex bodies to create new alliances and seek stronger political representation, especially when they share a common resource base. There remains a need for effective conflict resolution processes; representation and transparency will help ensure the long term relevance of these newly emerging institutions. New institutions are also vulnerable to being captured by local elite or losing their identification and function, causing them to operate more like NGOs and possibly losing their effectiveness in the process. Some of these organizations have collapsed after being drawn into political struggles, and ceasing to represent the needs of forest-dependent constituent communities.

WHAT'S WORKING AND WHAT'S NOT

Meeting participants agreed that there is a growing incidence of local community-based forest protection actions emerging throughout the Asia region. This process is often initiated within forest communities, both by traditional and by new leaders. Many communities are taking action because of concerns over deteriorating natural habitats and declining water, wood, food and other forest-generated resources. Forest protection and management is increasingly perceived as an essential task necessary to ensure the quality of life or even continued residence in the area. Severe deforestation can force communities to abandon ancestral homes, marginalizing them as landless migrants or urban slum dwellers. Community forest protection represents a positive adaptive social response to increasing population pressures on the resource base. An Asia-wide shift from looser, extensive systems of natural resource use and control to more intensified access controls will likely continue broadly throughout the region in the coming decades, driven by small, local resource user communities.

Panelists noted that many government planners and development agencies staff do not understand or accept the concept of community-based forest management as a broader process of social response to growing environmental problems. They retain the belief that communities must be provided incentives in the form of development project "carrots" to be motivated to participate in forestry activities. This perspective constrains government project designers from effectively supporting the internal social energy driving grassroots forest protection movements. Instead, planners are forced to rely on old development paradigms and projects, which re- main characterized by top-down decision making, rigid, time-bound operational plans, with project assets controlled and largely absorbed by implementing agencies.

While community forest initiatives are often driven by environmental concerns and begin with closure and protection strategies, many rural families also want to expand the availability of important forest products. Both government and non-government organizations must develop new capacities and mechanisms to provide communities with information, technologies, and capital to restore and improve the quality and productivity of their natural forests. Donor agencies and forest departments must support community-based forestry research experiments, train their staff to carry out technical extension, and create new means to channel micro-credit to small forest production systems. The long-term impact of development investments will be enhanced if benefits go to the users and small funds are allowed to grow and finance community development projects decided on by group members. Trust needs to be maintained through transparency and open accounts. Support is required to adequately build financial management skills and provide information on the larger environment so that the communities can take responsibility for the impact of their activities on the larger watershed.

The ascendance of new umbrella organizational structures for small, forest management groups received considerable attention during the meeting. In India these new federations are found in some western and eastern states. Apex organizations are also developing in parts of upland Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, and other countries in the region. Participants indicated that these new institutions serve several important functions including facilitating coordination among small management units, mediating conflicts, and representing collective concerns and needs to government agencies. In the future, apex organizations may provide increasing support for forest product processing and marketing activities, as well as become a source for micro-credit. In regions were local government representatives are unresponsive to the needs of small forest user groups, apex organizations provide a new mechanism for social and political organizing.

The development of community forest management federations and apex organizations was reported to be constrained by a number of factors. Some forest department staff view them as threatening to their own authority and, as a consequence, federations are often ignored by state agencies. Without recognition by the forest department, apex organizations are not allowed to play important roles and develop new capacities. Where federations are successfully establishing themselves, they may be in danger of being hijacked by special interests, local elite, or outsiders, loosing their ability to represent the interests of their membership. Involvement in fiscal management can corrupt federation leaders.

Despite these dangers, federations and apex organizations can and are playing constructive roles in supporting forest user groups. Forestry agencies can further enhance the contribution of apex organizations by recognizing and establishing stronger links with them. NGOs can play a supportive catalytic role in assisting the development of user group federations and networks, by recognizing that these new bodies are not NGOs, and by helping them to define their unique activities. Both forest departments and NGOs can encourage apex bodies to retain a transparency of operations and resistance to domination by vested interests.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

At the close of the AFN meeting national teams met to discuss future CFM transition goals and strategies and to identify specific actions that should be taken within their country. Countries with larger teams tended to develop more elaborate plans. Due to the limited number of participants from mainland Southeast Asian countries, this group met jointly to explore regional strategies. The ideas presented here represent possible strategies, as well as activities that are already evolving.

INDIA

Four initiatives were identified as components of the India action research program. Many of these initiatives are already being carried out by World Wide Fund for Nature - India (WWF-India), the Society for the Promotion of Wastelands Development (SPWD), and by members of the National Support Group (NSG) on joint Forest Management. Each is presented with a brief description of the current plan for implementation.

FORESTERS NETWORK

A network of young forestry professionals has been evolving in India over the last five years. Comprised mostly of 30- to 40-year-old Divisional Forest Officers, the group has met informally at NSG meetings and related gatherings. Members of the nascent network have also collaborated in designing new spatial mapping tools for joint forest management program planning and monitoring purposes. This group is being expanded and provided with increased support to allow it to better develop JFM implementation practices. A support cell is being established at WWF-India which will create the capacity for routine exchanges between foresters, through both meetings, newsletters, and working papers. The Inspector General has asked all state forest department chiefs to suggest young officers who might participate in the network, to add to those already involved in exchanges.

POLICY SUPPORT GROUP

During the last five years there has been a recognition among planners, NGOs, donors, and researchers that India is now committed to pursuing policies supporting the greater involvement of communities in the protection and management of public forest lands. This transitional period may take decades and could involve the devolution of rights and responsibilities to communities for at least 50 percent of the public forest domain, representing tens of millions of hectares. How this historic reallocation of resource rights and responsibilities will take place is a question of immense importance. Since there are no existing precedents, design of new policies and programs to allow these changes to occur must be drawn from emerging experiences. A learning mechanism is needed to help collect and synthesize field experiences, interpret it and feed it back to policy makers, planners, donors, forestry officials, NGOs, and community organizations.

The JFM national support group (NSG) provides a mechanism to synthesize field experience, but is limited to annual meetings. To complement the NSG, a smaller body should be formed to meet every 6 to 8 weeks to discuss emerging policy issues, and better articulate JFM program challenges and necessary support actions. While composition of the team is still under discussion, the group should be diverse, including senior officers from state forest departments, younger officers with territorial assignments, NGOs, researchers, and possibly donors. The group will be most effective if it does not exceed 10 persons. Participants should be committed to attending meetings, and taking periodic field trips. The Policy Support Group would interact with the Foresters Network and the NSG, and assist the MOEF.

ARUNACHAL PRADESH STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT

Northeastern India possesses some of the nation's most extensive and intact, old growth forest. Eighty-two percent of the state is under forest cover. Unlike other parts of the country, where forest lands were nationalized, in the northeast indigenous community tenure systems are still respected. While approximately one-quarter of the state's land area is managed by the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department, the remaining three-quarters is largely under the management of the tribal communities. Traditional forest management systems have in the past sustained these rich, bio-diverse ecosystems, but they appear to be facing new threats. In recent years, commercial timber interests from Assam, Bangladesh, and other parts of eastern India have been moving into Arunachal, searching for logging opportunities. As Arunachal communities are drawn into the commercial economy, offers for cash can be attractive to low-income communities but have the potential to result in rapid deforestation. Some state officials are also eager to exploit commercial timber stocks and gain greater control over community forest resources.

The current forest management situation in Arunachal should be assessed to determine threats to existing management systems, and to explore with communities ways to generate income that do not result in the environmental degradation. Issues of particular interest include: (1) the nature of current illegal logging operations and their impact on communities and the forest environment; (2) the strength of existing forest tenure systems and the composition of community membership in management decision making; (3) community perceptions concerning forest use goals and production problems and opportunities; and (4) implications for forest department support programs. A research team would be developed by WWF-India, in collaboration with the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department, and would conduct a 2-week participatory field assessment, holding a series of discussions with forest communities. This would provide a basis for a workshop in Arunachal to further assess the findings and future actions.

SPATIAL PLANNING TOOLS

Recently, a team of Divisional Forest Officer (DFOs) has been working with the Asia Forest Network, Society for the Promotion of Wasteland Development (SPWD), and WWF-India to design a new planning process for JFM program implementation. The tools are used to identify and inventory communities that protect forests as well as those that are forest users. Forest vegetation is also mapped and classified, showing areas that are protected and regenerating and those that are open-access and degrading. Finally, management issues are identified, covering a range of problems and opportunities. DFOs work in collaboration with their range and beat officers to gather the required information and analyze it jointly to develop a common action strategy. The tools also provide a framework for ongoing monitoring, allowing the staff to evaluate their progress in involving communities in forest management and stimulating forest regeneration periodically. The JFM Planning Tools are based on 1:50,000 Survey of India topographic maps (GT) sheets, using plastic overlays for data collection. The methods are now being used by the Forest Department to inventory community forest protection groups throughout Orissa.

PHILIPPINES

During the Asia Forest Network meeting in Hawaii in 1994 a group of individuals from government agencies and NGOs working on community forest management in the Philippines decided to establish the Philippine Working Group (PWG) as an informal body. The joint goal of the working group is to share experiences to more fully reveal, policy failures and operational constraints and identify strategies to overcome them. The group has met regularly over the last two years, visiting 10 sites throughout the Philippines. During each visit the working group interviews community members and leaders, local Department of Environment and Natural Re- sources (DENR) staff, and local government officials to illuminate weak- nesses in existing national programs and to suggest alternatives to improve the management practices of cultural communities. The PWG is dynamic and evolving, and has played an influential role in shaping the new Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) policies now emerging in the Philippines. The PWG agreed to take the following actions over the coming year to support the new CBFM policies and initiatives taken by the DENR.

The PWG will seek formal recognition in order to act with greater legitimacy and authority as an advisory body to top DENR officials and as a resource body for CBFM strategy development. Community mapping will be an integral component of the PWG strategy in support of CBFM. Each DENR region will establish goals and programs for training local governments and DENR staff. The PWG will produce a manual to assist training in community forest mapping techniques. Monitoring of the new training and mapping program will be incorporated into subsequent site visits. A newly established CBFM office in DENR will coordinate activities with the PWG secretariat and manage a centralized information data source on CFM related activities. For the first half of 1997, the PWG will develop regional action plans that translate new and emerging policies into specific activities. The PWG will also be available to the DENR as an independent reviewer for CBFM policy. Later in the year, the PWG will conduct a series of visits to potential CBFM sites to establish monitoring indices for follow-on program implementation. The PWG also intends to facilitate greater donor communication and sharing of experiences from the field.

The PWG will work with other AFN member countries to facilitate visits to Nepal and Indonesia. The first visit will draw from the experiences of the Nepal's forest agency to understand how they have facilitated staff transitions and the development of new organizational capacities. Internal and NGO implemented training programs will also be evaluated, including changes in the curricula of forestry schools targeted towards long-term staff development. The second visit to Indonesia will focus on community forest production systems including visits to rattan gardens and post-harvest facilities. Future cross-visits by community leaders to facilitate technology transfer will also be planned. A visit by a group of senior JFM planners from India is being scheduled in 1997 to explore the establishment of a parallel working group mechanism in that country. The Indian visit would be scheduled to take place at the time of a PWG meeting.

CAMBODIA

Government sponsored community forest management is a relatively new concept in Cambodia. Over 20 years of government instability has resulted in the disruption of traditional management systems in many areas. Deforestation was exacerbated by the past Khmer Rouge policy of cutting down forests to plant rice and the current illegal logging along the Thai border. Two pilots in community forestry are being launched with the help of two NGOs, the Mennonite Central Committee and CONCERN. The projects are being conducted in Prey Ler (Takeo Province) and Komchaimeas (Prey Veng Province). After reviewing experiences from these pilots, a decision will be made to extend community forestry from 2 to 14 districts over 10 years.

International assistance is needed to help Cambodia design new forest policy and supporting laws on community forestry. Due to a lack of forestry staff, training inputs are critical to support community forestry in the kingdom. The Asia Forest Network is exploring ways to help Cambodia develop local policy and institutional capacity in community forestry.

VIET NAM

The Forest Inventory and Planning Institute (FIPI) has just completed a two-year study of community-forest interactions patterns and management systems in northwestern Viet Nam. During the next phase of FIPI's MacArthur Foundation-supported program, the team intends to extend its action research program to additional sites in the north and northwest. FIPI will attempt to draw communities and local government officials into dialogues to identify ways to improve coordination between indigenous management institutions and practices and emerging government and private sector policies and programs. Government planners, forestry professionals, development agency staff, and university researchers are beginning to meet regularly in Hanoi to discuss experience emerging from rural development and resource management programs in the upland regions of the north and northwest. The Asia Forest Network and FIPI hope to contribute to this exchange.

INDONESIA

An action research team facilitated by the Indonesia Biodiversity Foundation (KEHATI) has been developing a second phase for the AFN policy and field research program in East Kalimantan over the past year. The challenge faced by the team is designing a diagnostic field assessment program that involves communities in developing new collaborative management elements while linking this strategy to newly emerging community forestry policies being designed by the national Ministry of Forestry. The Indonesian meeting participants identified some program objectives:

Develop a participatory process for transferring management responsibilities for public forest lands to local communities. This activity could include designing implementation procedures for community forestry systems (Hutan Rakyat) being approved by the Ministry of Forestry through the Village Forest Block System (Persil Hutan Desa System). This new program targets natural production forests not currently under private concessions and will designate them for management by communities with opportunities for the participation of NGOs.

Help build a consensus among professionals and planners supporting the devolution of forest management rights to resident communities. This would be facilitated through organizing seminars and workshops that bring government planners, NGOs, and development agency staff together for joint discussions and the writing of a series of synthesis papers assimilating experience from past and ongoing CFM programs and projects. Attempts to create a broader, consensual strategy will focus first on the province of East Kalimantan.

Identify and locate program areas in forests with resident communities where earlier logging concessions have been cancelled or expired. Site selection should consider the interest of the community in taking over some management responsibilities for the forest, and should be outside of areas targeted for commercial conversion or other activities including commercial plantation establishment, mining, and transmigration. Candidate sites should be selected and assessed prior to implementing diagnostic research activities to determine if they conform to criteria outlined above.

Establish communication centers in Samarinda and Bogor to facilitate exchanges between university, NGO, government, and donor staff developing community forest management strategies in East Kalimantan. . Individuals involved with the program will continue to act as facilitators of exchange and disseminators of information to all interested parties. They will also publish two synthesis papers on recent provincial experiences with CFM and a review of all government CFM policies and programs.

NEPAL

The Nepal participants at the Asia Forest Network meeting identified several areas where strategic actions could be taken to promote community forest management at both the national, regional and international level. These included accelerating case study and analysis research in the following areas:

Development of forest enterprises for forest user groups (FUGs)

Markets for FUG products

Conflict resolution mechanisms

Management information systems

Networking of FUGs

FUGs serving as resource groups to other FUGs

Population and resource maps

The Nepal group noted the need to annually organize national community forestry seminars to discuss emerging field experiences and to translate findings into policy and legislation development. Nepal could also become a base for international training programs in community forestry. Nepal's two decades of experience in developing field programs and policy instruments for forest transitions can provide a rich source of learning and training materials.

UPLAND MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Participants from Viet Nam, China, Thailand, and Cambodia met to discuss common policy and operational strategies for community forestry programs in upland, mainland Southeast Asia. The discussion momentarily ignored political boundaries to define the region in terms of its cultural and biophysical features. Participants identified common characteristics including its ecology, history, settlement patterns, and economy. Discussions revealed a distinctive regional identity, with many shared problems and opportunities. It was suggested that a bio-regional policy discussion group be established to identify parallels and share learning regarding the unique needs of the region. Some observation on the common history and characteristics of the region identified by the group are briefly discussed below.

REGIONAL CHARACTERIZATION

For thousands of years the upland areas of Southeast Asia represented a remote bio-cultural region where diverse tribes practiced long rotation farming, shifting their settlements periodically. Successive migrations from southern China between 1000 and 1800 flowed through this region, with new groups establishing themselves in Southeast Asia. Political power centers in lowland river valleys and deltas had limited interactions with upland ethnic minority groups, though the extraction of natural re- sources grew through the 19th and early 20th centuries. World War II and the early independence period were times of struggle and the consolidation of nation states that left upland areas relatively unaffected. However, from the 1960's onward the governments of China, Viet Nam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma have delineated their control over the uplands regions by closing borders and implementing nati