This report is based on research and analysis undertaken with the objective of deepening the understanding of CCAs in India, primarily to achieve two goals. Firstly, to bring to light the unknown conservation efforts undertaken in India and secondly, to attempt an action plan that would cater to the individual and overall needs of these areas. This report is based on research in nineteen sites across six Indian states, studied over a year.

Community based forestry has the potential to contribute much more to achieving sustainable development and poverty reduction than is the case today. This paper describes and analyzes these potentials and demonstrates their feasibility with real world cases of community forest businesses and innovative policies and business partnerships.

Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) is an integrative approach for implementing sustainable management of natural resources, based on a main hypothesis, that is: if there is a high degree of collaboration between stakeholders combined with a high adaptiveness of management systems, the result will be a higher degree of human well being and ecological sustainability. A worldwide network under the umbrella of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) is engaged in researching the potential and methodological aspects related to ACM.

This manual provides a comprehensive set of criteria and indicators (C&I) for sustainable forest management based on CIFOR’s research. This research was conducted by interdisciplinary teams of experts in large-scale natural forests managed for commercial timber production in Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil and Cameroon, with additional sites in Germany, Austria and USA. The use of the term ‘generic template’ for these C&I is intended to prevent them being confused with an ideal and universally applicable set of C&I.