Within the context of RECOFTC’s overall goal to strengthen rights, improve governance and ensure equitable benefits to forest dependent men, women and other excluded groups, RECOFTC has been implementing a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (FAO-RAP) funded project entitled “Mainstreaming Gender into Forest Policies”.

The training manual on improving grassroots equity in the forests and climate change context, aims to develop the knowledge and capacity needed among grassroots facilitators to implement genuinely participatory processes for improving grassroots equity in forest-based climate change policy frameworks, mechanisms and initiatives.

In many Asian countries, communities and smallholders are faced with barriers to exercising their tenure rights and to making a living from selling timber and other forest products. This study puts forward an effort to respond to the issue of restrictions, in the form of regulatory barriers, in the pursuit of sustainable forest management.

In December 2004, the passing of the Forest Protection and Development Law (FPDL) legally recognized community forest management (CFM) in Vietnam for the first time. Despite this step, skepticism remains about whether CFM can work in practice and to what extent legal recognition contributes to effective forest protection and management.

During 2008, in response to these concerns, the Forest Governance Learning Group (FGLG) visited 25 villages to learn from field implementation of CFM in seven provinces.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, as well as conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks and promoting sustainable management of forests in developing countries (REDD+) has been proposed as an effective mechanism to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Read RECOFTC’s digital annual report, “Building resilience through community forestry.” This report covers the period October 2017 to September 2019.

Applications are now being accepted for a regional learning workshop on applying a participatory development communication apporach in forest landscapes in the Asia and Pacific region. The workshop is an event of the Asia-Pacific Forestry Communication Network.

PES is a new concept gaining momentum in the Asia-Pacific region. But what are the enabling conditions for employing PES schemes, and how can they be made pro-poor? Payment for Environmental Services (PES) sets up systems where beneficiaries of environmental services reward the providers of such services with payments or other non-financial goods (market access, land security, public services, infrastructure, capacity building).

This is a case study under the USAID supported "Grassroots Equity and Enhanced Networks in the Mekong Program" for  Na Ot village, Na Ot commune, Mai Son district, Son La province, Viet Nam. The Na Ot villagers have protected their forest ever since the establishment of the village, but poverty has been one of the reasons why they didn’t take part in the protection more proactively in the previous years as they had to focus on income generation.

The European Union funded Voices for Mekong Forests (V4MF) project conducted a set of forest governance and capacity needs assessments in late 2017 and early 2018 to assess the state of forest governance in five GMS countries: Thailand, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Viet Nam.

This report address the current state of forest governance in Viet Nam, while also suggesting specific measures that can be implemented to overcome the challenges identified and realize the extensive governance opportunities that exist in the region.

This bulletin draws on country-level experience to share civil society perspectives on the challenges, opportunities, and possible approaches for pro-poor REDD. As governments begin to formulate their national REDD programs, questions are emerging about the role of local people in design and implementation, and the socio-economic implications for the rural poor. Drawing on experiences from Nepal and Vietnam, this bulletin includes:

In Southeast Asia, shifting cultivation is still predominantly practiced by the poorest segment of the population. Around 40 million people living in forest-agricultural lands from the ASEAN countries still depend considerably on shifting cultivation, also referred to as swidden farming and rotational farming, for income and livelihoods. Traditionally considered as a sustainable practice, it is now fast becoming one of the causes of forest degradation.