The report describes the impacts of forestry decentralization on district finance, local communities and spatial planning, drawing on an 18-month research project in Bulungan District in East Kalimantan Province. It describes forestry management policies following the implementation of regional autonomy, and their impacts on district revenue and local livelihoods. The authors analyze district spatial planning, forest land use and community control over forest lands.

Local people in South-east Asia are often cited as skilled forest managers. It is barely acknowledged that an essential part of this forest management does not concern natural forests, but forests that have been planted, often after the removal of pre-existing natural forests; forests that are cultivated not by professional foresters, but by sedentary or swidden farmers, on their farmlands; forests that are based not on exotic, fast-growing trees, but on local tree species, and harbour an incredible variety of plant and animal species.

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are being considered worldwide with great interest and expectation. Proposals to create agreements in which beneficiaries of environmental services pay landowners directly for the provision or protection of these services are innovative and promising. But what real PES experiences are actually out there? This work assesses a range of PES or PES-type experiences in one country, Bolivia, in the fields of carbon sequestration, protection of watershed services, biodiversity and aesthetic landscape values.

The report describes the impacts of forestry decentralization on district finance, local communities and spatial planning, drawing on an 18-month research project in Bulungan District in East Kalimantan Province. It describes forestry management policies following the implementation of regional autonomy, and their impacts on district revenue and local livelihoods. The authors analyze district spatial planning, forest land use and community control over forest lands.

The preliminary conclusions put forward in this Rural Sector Note may be used as basis for further discussions between the Government and the World Bank to ascertain the mutual interest in any programme or project follow up.

This publication reflects the outcome of an ambitious initiative to identify instances of exemplary forest management in the region and examine the core components of high quality forest management in an effort to illustrate good forest management to a wide audience and encourage others to take up some of the most promising ideas, methods and approaches. More than 170 nominations were received from 21 countries in the region. Twenty-eight case studies were selected.

Dr. Juan Pulhin reports how the forest sector is addressing this challenge with some ambitious targets that include: uplands poverty halved in 15 years; forests under sustainable management, within 10 years; healthy forest-based industries, within 5 years in this report.

"Although locals were unfamiliar with even the local term for ‘biodiversity' they readily understood the concept and its importance after a brief explanation. Furthermore, it became clear that, as a result of the security of use rights in their community forests, locals did indeed value species for their contribution to the overall health of the ecosystem regardless of any other benefits they may bring."

Community forestry has no doubt come a long way towards becoming part of mainstream forestry in some countries. However, its potential to make a difference in the management of the forestry sector and rural development is yet to be widely recognized.

Assesses the process of rural land registration in Mozambique and the outcomes for poor and marginalised groups. The research finds that community land registration, under the 1997 land law, can strengthen community rights to use and benefit from their land in relation to outsider interests in land. However, intra-community and intra-household land rights are not addressed, since it is only community land boundaries which are registered.

In The National Forest Plan of 1977, the poor and mountainous kingdom of Nepal recognized the need for the people’s participation in managing its forests. In an article for RECOFTC, Dr Keshav Kanel of Nepal’s Department of Forest, records the changes in society, governance and economy wrought by this gradual – but not uncontroversial – move to community forestry.