The overall aim of this study was to explore what the development community can do, or facilitate, to significantly improve livelihoods in semi-arid systems.The authors based their analysis on two case-study sites in the communal lands of southern Zimbabwe. The main tool was a detailed livelihood questionnaire, supplemented by participatory appraisal and observation, action research, biophysical analysis and systems modelling.

Many people want to improve the governance of forest areas, yet what is considered good governance is not necessarily self-evident or agreed upon by everyone. This study demonstrates the diversity of views held by communities and government officials in Malinau, Indonesian Borneo about what they consider to be good governance. Each group described how they thought decisions about forests should be made, including how to represent interests, allocate land rights, distribute cash benefits from forests, share information and manage forests.

This report is based on a case study looking at the change in decentralization laws from the highly decentralized system under 22/1999 to a moderate system under 32/2004. It specifically analyses the implications of such change for local-level forest decision making processes related to forestry, spatial planning, shared revenues and village-level institutions in Luwu Utara district, South Sulawesi province. The research is a continuation of previous ACIAR/CIFOR collaborative research under the theme “Can Decentralization Work for Forests and the Poor?”.

This Policy Brief: (1) outlines recommendations for change and improvement; (2) describes the legal and institutional infrastructure of decentralized forest management in Cameroon; (3) describes how basic mechanisms of decentralized forest management operate in practice; and (4) summarizes the findings of five years of World Resources Institute (WRI)-Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) research on decentralized forestry policy and practice.

The study documents practices of 28 community-based forest enterprises (CBFEs) in Nepal, representing different enterprise models - FUGs (CFUGs or LFUGs), networks, cooperatives, and companies. FUGs are primarily constrained by their limited scale in terms of membership and land area. The formation of intergroups and networks minimizes this limitation. Networks are often constrained from doing group enterprises since they do not have legal identity to transact as a group and this constraint can be overcome by registering as a formal business entity - either as a cooperative or a company.

Data from damar agroforest and hill dipterocarp forest sites suggest that income alone is inadequate for explaining why people conserve a non-timber forest product. The explanatory value of several cash income-based indicators was tested and the results showed that these indicators provide only a partial explanation of people's conservation behaviour.

In the last two decades, there has been increasing interest in the potential of small-scale non-timber forest product collection and other low-impact uses of the forest for achieving forest conservation. Experience suggests however that such uses do not guarantee conservation and economic outcomes. This book documents and compares methods to assess options for forest-based livelihoods and their outcomes.