Devolution of Control of Common Pool Resources to Local Communities: Experiences in Forestry

In overlapping situations which involve how rural households used their own resources in dealing with income and material flows through drawing on scrubland, forest, and woodland and where woodland and forests comprise a larger livelihood systems where land had to be managed by its various users as a group, common pool resources (CPR) of forest products has played no small part. In such systems, rotational agriculture is adopted wherein periods of cultivations are alternated with longer bouts of forest fallow. With ongoing political and economic changes, along with the effects of the growing...

In overlapping situations which involve how rural households used their own resources in dealing with income and material flows through drawing on scrubland, forest, and woodland and where woodland and forests comprise a larger livelihood systems where land had to be managed by its various users as a group, common pool resources (CPR) of forest products has played no small part. In such systems, rotational agriculture is adopted wherein periods of cultivations are alternated with longer bouts of forest fallow. With ongoing political and economic changes, along with the effects of the growing population, the collective systems that were in charge of managing and utilizing CPR have encountered several difficulties. This chapter looks into how systems that employ a certain amount of local collective control on the access and management of forest and forest product resources.