This extensive reference writes a modern history of forestry in Japan, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and other Asian countries, reflecting industrial and colonial exploitation, periods of excessive deforestation, and the alienation of local residents from natural resources. Drawing on their experience as"participant observers"in local practice, the authors suggest new,"inclusive"approaches to forestry governance that support sustainable development, environmental preservation, and the productive collaboration by various stakeholders. The mismatched interests of local citizens and outsiders have split the development of Asia's natural and cultural resources. Taking this complexity into account, the essays in this volume advance a definition of effective governance that achieves more than the successful execution of resource management. It pursues a new vision of society in which all stakeholders collaborate to govern the use of certain resources. This volume outlines two key conditions for effective resource management: sharing and commitment (or graduated membership), which transcend mere material issues to determine the social and cultural value of a resource.

This book provides a novel approach to governance relating to biodiversity and human well-being in complex tropical landscapes, including forests and protected areas. It focuses attention at the interface between communities and the landscape level, building on interdisciplinary research conducted in five countries (Cameroon, Indonesia, Laos, Madagascar and Tanzania). In each country, the research was set within the framework of a major national policy thrust. The book improves our understanding of and ability to manage complex landscapes---mosaics of differing land uses---in a more adaptive and collaborative way that benefits both the environment and local communities. It includes both single country and cross-site analyses, and focuses on themes, such as resettlement, land use planning, non-timber forest product use and management, the disconnect between customary and formal legal systems, and the role of larger scale policies in local level realities. Chapters also analyze experience with monitoring and a local governance assessment tool. The work also provides guidance for those interested in management and governance at lower and intermediate levels (village, district), scales likely to grow in importance in the global effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This book assesses the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and identifies lessons learned for governance and policy through this new and innovative approach to collaborative forest management. Unlike anything else in US public land management, the CFLRP is a nationwide program that requires collaboration throughout the life of national forest restoration projects, joining agency partners and local stakeholder groups in a kind of decade-long restoration marriage. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the governance dynamics of the program, examining: questions about collaborative governance processes and the dynamics of trust, accountability and capacity; how scientific information is used in making decisions and integrated into adaptive management processes; and the topic of collaboration through implementation, an underdeveloped area of collaborative governance literature. Bringing together chapters from a community of social science and policy researchers who have conducted studies across multiple CFLRP projects, this volume generates insights, not just about the program, but also about dynamics that are central to collaborative and landscape approaches to land management and relevant for broader practice. This volume is a timely and important contribution to environmental governance scholarship. It will be of interest to researchers and students of natural resource management, environmental governance, and forestry, as well as practitioners and policy makers involved in forest and ecosystem restoration efforts, and collaborative natural resource management more broadly.

Collaborative approaches to governance are being used to address some of the most difficult environmental issues across the world, but there is limited focus on the challenges of practice. Leading scholars from the United States, Europe and Australia explore the theory and practice in a range of contexts, highlighting the lessons from practice, the potential limitations of collaboration and the potential strategies for addressing these challenges.

The influence of the past, and of the future on current-time tradeoffs in the forest arena are particularly relevant given the long-term successions in forest landscapes and the hundred years’ rotations in forestry. Historically established path dependencies and conflicts determine our present situation and delimit what is possible to achieve. Similarly, future trends and desires have a large influence on decision making. Nevertheless, decisions about forest governance and management are always made in the present – in the present-time appraisal of the developed situation, future alternatives and in negotiation between different perspectives, interests, and actors. This book explores historic and future outlooks as well as current tradeoffs and methods in forest governance and management. It emphasizes the generality and complexity with empirical data from Sweden and internationally. It first investigates, from a historical perspective, how previous forest policies and discourses have influenced current forest governance and management. Second, it considers methods to explore alternative forest futures and how the results from such investigations may influence the present. Third, it examines current methods of balancing tradeoffs in decision-making among ecosystem services. Based on the findings the authors develop an integrated approach – Reflexive Forestry – to support exchange of knowledge and understandings to enable capacity building and the establishment of common ground. Such societal agreements, or what the authors elaborate as forest social contracts, are sets of relational commitment between involved actors that may generate mutual action and a common directionality to meet contemporary challenges.

This book examines the value of Adaptive Collaborative Management for facilitating learning and collaboration with local communities and beyond, utilising detailed studies of forest landscapes and communities. Many forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies, such as the Million Tree Initiatives, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and REDD+, often neglecting local communities. In the context of the climate crisis, it is imperative that local peoples and communities are an integral part of all decisions relating to resource management. Rather than being seen as beneficiaries or people to be safeguarded, they should be seen as full partners, and Adaptive Collaborative Management is an approach which priorities the rights and roles of communities alongside the need to address the environmental crisis. The volume presents detailed case studies and real life examples from across the globe, promoting and prioritizing the voices of women and scholars and practitioners from the Global South who are often under-represented. Providing concrete examples of ways that a bottom-up approach can function to enhance development sustainably, via its practitioners and far beyond the locale in which they initially worked, this volume demonstrates the lasting utility of approaches like Adaptive Collaborative Management that emphasize local control, inclusiveness and local creativity in management. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development and natural resource management and development studies more broadly. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Providing a critical and incisive examination of community forestry, this is a detailed study of complex issues in local forest governance, community sustainability and grassroots environmentalism. It explores community forestry as an alternative form of local collaborative governance in globally significant developed forest regions, with examples ranging from the Gulf Islands of British Columbia to Scandinavia. Responding to the global trend in devolution of control over forest resources and the ever-increasing need for more sustainable approaches to forest governance, the book highlights both the possibilities and challenges associated with community forestry implementation. It features compelling case studies and accounts from those directly involved with community forestry efforts, providing unique insight into the underlying social processes, issues, events and perceptions. It will equip students, researchers and practitioners with a deep understanding of both the evolution and management of community forestry in a pan-national context.

This new textbook provides an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to both the policy background and contemporary governance of forests in the United States. Starting with a history of the development of forest policies and conservation agencies, the book then explores the diversity of forest owners, users, and uses and examines emerging approaches to forest governance that cross traditional jurisdictional and property boundaries. It tackles key contemporary issues such as the forest water nexus, the conservation of threatened and endangered species, and the challenges of managing fire, insect, and disease dynamics under a changing climate. Key focal areas include the emergence of collaborative approaches to forest governance, community forest relationships, changes to corporate timberland ownership, and contemporary governance mechanisms such as certification and payments for ecosystem services. This text raises the "big questions" about the distribution of rights and responsibilities in forest management, the tensions between equity and efficiency, and how to sustain a diversity of forest values under the pressures of ecological and social complexity. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, this textbook provides a timely synthesis of both the foundations and current trends and issues in forest policy and governance in the United States with a strong emphasis on illustrative real-world cases. Forest Policy and Governance in the United States is essential reading for students in forest and natural resource policy courses and will be of great use to students in environmental governance courses. It will also be of interest to policymakers and professionals working in forest conservation and in the forest industry.