In search of excellence deviates from the path that most authors have taken. Instead of dwelling on the failures and the negative, it celebrates the “good” and the many positive management efforts in the Asia–Pacific region. It highlights the many people who are striving for excellence in forest management and seeks to encourage others to emulate these positive efforts. Collectively, the story of forestry that emerges may be more about endeavour and ingenuity than greed, indifference and incompetence.

Ratanakiri is divided into 9 districts covering 240 villages and approximately 100,000 people. Of these,
65% are minority hill tribes comprising groups such as the Jarai, Tampoen, Kui, etc. with only about 5% of the people literate. Over the past five years, international monitoring groups estimate that 120% of the land has been appropriated through land sales and concessions for logging, mining, and commercial agriculture.

An assessment of community level forest conflict in Cambodia. It was conducted as part of a project to understand the types, causes, and impacts of conflicts over forest resources at the community level in selected Asian countries and to assess methods to avoid, reduce, and monitor conflicts. Information is provided on underlying causes of forest conflict in Cambodia, the context and nature of this conflict, and approaches for mitigation.

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.

The study was based on initial research during 2000 and 2002 in the districts of Kapuas, Central Kalimantan, supplemented with interviews with policy makers in Jakarta during July-August 2001. This paper considers how the decentralization process involves legal and institutional changes that encompass a wide arrary of actors, institutions and levels of government. It raises issues of coordination, negotiation and conflict across multiple levels and jurisdictions.

Governments around the world increasingly seek to manage their forests with the collaboration of the people living nearby. Ministries of forestry or their equivalents usually do this by offering local people access to selected forest products or forest land, income from forest resources, or opportunities for communicating with government forestry officials. In return, the agency obliges local people to cooperate in managing the forests around them by protecting existing forest or by planting trees.

This document is intended for those interested in gathering natural resource information that reflects the needs of local communities. It describes a multidisciplinary survey developed with indigenous communities in the fores-rich landscapes of the Malinau watershed in East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). The final methods reflect a mixture of judgements, compromises and reactions to trials over many months. It is intended that it is useful to readers from diverse backgrounds given the multidisciplinary nature of the procedures described. This is not intended as a manual.

RECOFTC conducted a review of the linkages between community forestry and poverty, with an emphasis on Asia. The analysis shows that clear empirical evidence exists, demonstrating that community forestry has provided tangible benefits to poor people. However, the evidence is limited to a few cases and there is no clear indication that these benefits have been scaled-up across a wider range. This has been a general pattern across the whole development sector, not just within forestry.

The Communal Land Associations in Community Forests of Budongo Sub-county are the first pilots in Uganda, and are still in the process of formation. Given that this is a new method for group tenure interests in resource management, the process should be dynamic and invite close analysis for improvement.

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 book is a report of a short-term research project. The project aimed to test an approach for estimating local values for landscape units and relate these to formal biodiversity conservation values in Gorongosa National Park (GNP), Sofala Province, Mozambique. First section describes the research site selection and gives short descriptions of the chosen sites: Muaredzi and Nhanchururu. Second section is about the community landscape valuations, includes also the methods and results concerning conceptual models, spatial data sets, and participatory community assessments.

Community forestry has transformed over the past 25 years from being an experimental means of providing wood-fuel for the rural poor to a community-led movement demanding reform of the forestry sector. International networks to promote community forestry, which emerged at very different moments in this history with different visions, goals, targets and participants, have played a key role in this transformation.