Contribution of Community Forestry to Protected Areas Management

Authors: Mike Nurse, RECOFTC

Community forestry will be the ‘glue' that connects communities and protected areas together

In most countries in the region, local communities' use of forest resources is strictly regulated. The strategy of managing forests through stringent protection and regulation has in fact not been very successful in protecting forests in Asia, and has resulted in conflicts between enforcement officers and communities.New strategies are required that acknowledge the high costs and conflicts in classical protected area management approaches and look at complementary strategies for achieving conservation by working with, rather than against, local communities.

A recent analysis has shown that there is a large potential for community forestry to deliver poverty-related outcomes to scale-up these approaches and therefore a broad scope for community forestry to contribute to the Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015. This paper expands on this analysis, arguing that community forestry also has the potential to connect forest-dependent communities with protected areas management.