This book focuses primarily on changes that have taken place in the Malinau area in East Kalimantan in recent years. The Punan Malinau, who inhabit the area, are former nomads who subsist on a wide range of forest-oriented activities, including swidden agriculture, hunting and the collection of and trade in forest products. During the past ten years, the arrival of a growing number of powerful outsiders, including NGO's, timber and mining companies, has contributed to increasing competition for land and for various new sources of income.

One of the challenges the communities face when managing forests is the lack of a systematic and transparent monitoring system that can be used to monitor their resource management strategies and to communicate their successes to outsiders. This paper argues that monitoring efforts will be sustainable only if the system has been developed by the communities in collaboration with other relevant stakeholders with an aim of enhancing their learning and understanding rather than for compliance purposes.

A heated debate has been going on for roughly three decades about who should hold stewardship over Asia’s tropical forests. This essay reviews how the debate evolved. Communal forestry advocates like NGOs point out that local groups living in remote corners of countries like Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and India have been managing forests for centuries. They provide examples of successful precolonial communal management practices, which eventually gave way to commercial interests in the late nineteenth century.

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.

This infobrief provides key points that will benefit disadvantaged groups in multistakeholder negotiations. Negotiations that include all the groups or stakeholders concerned should increase democratic decision-making and compromise. Experience has shown that the benefits that disandvantaged groups receive from multistakeholder negotiations depend on how the negotiations are done. This infobrief describes some of the pitfalls of multistakeholder negotiations and proposes ways for disadvantaged groups to avoid them.

This simple manual is intended for general guidelines on traditional methods in managing natural resources. It is based on the indigenous/traditional knowledge of people of Dayak Kenyah Uma' Jalan society, East Kutai, Kalimantan, Indonesia. Local traditional knowledge is one of the important components to utilise and conserve the natural resources. This manual shows how to prepare the land for planting food crops, community forest management procedures and fire prevention.

CIFOR facilitated 27 communities in the Upper Malinau watershed to develop agreements about their village boundaries and map them through participatory methods. Decentralization reforms created new values of forest resources and uncertainties that increased conflict over local resources. We report on the nature of these conflicts, the stability of agreements and the factors affecting how agreements were reached.

This paper is an overview of participatory forest management in relation with property rights issue. It highlights the difficulty in defining property rights. Although the issues presented are applicable throughout tropical Asia, albeit less so in the Pacific, this paper is based primarily on the author's experience in Indonesia, and almost all of examples are from indonesia. This paper discuss the diversity and changing nature of property rights and continues with a discussion on the issue of communities demanding the rights and possible responses of the government.

This manual is a participatory methods guide (1) to assist those involved with multiple stakeholder situations or groups to appreciate and acknowledge the relevance and impact of micro-politics on stakeholder relations and resultant cooperative behaviour in these groups; (2) to provide a simple and systematic approach or framework to gather and analyse data on micro-politics among multiple stakeholders; (3) to highlight and offer practical suggestions for dealing with some of the methodological issues that influence gathering data on politics and relations among stakeholders; (4) to suggest

Mongolia’s forests are located in the transitional zone between the great Siberian taiga and the Mongolian plateau of grassland steppe. These forests play a critical role in preventing soil erosion and land degradation, in regulating the water regime in mountain areas, maintaining permafrost distribution, and in providing habitats for wildlife and preserving biodiversity.

The proper alignment of authority and responsibility within and between various levels of social organization is a fundamental governance problem. This study uses a review approach to critically interrogate the political economy of the allocation of environmental jurisdictions between the state, local communities and Rural District Councils in Zimbabwe. Rural District Councils have the authority to enact conservation and landuse planning by-laws.

The participatory forest fire prevention programme of Forest Fire Prevention Management Project (FFPMP) aims at intensive fuel management and fire control with the integrated green belt on community land on the boundary of Berbak National Park, Jambi Province, Sumatra. It aims to motivate farmers to cultivate their land continuously, reducing fire hazards and risks through formation of fuel breaks around the forest. Participating farmers face technical limitations in seedling production, land preparation without burning, and crop planting and protection.