Obstacles to community forestry Community Forestry - Module 10.2 Forestry Training Institute, Liberia

Obstacles: Too much bureaucracy and paperwork Many countries require communities to have management plans and various types of licenses and permits in order to have the right to manage their forests. The idea is to make sure that the communities manage their forests sustainably. The reality, however, is that all these demands on communities make community forestry programs very expensive. Communities don’t have the money or the skills required to produce professional management plans; so they are forced to depend on donors and logging companies to get the support they need. As a result they are not really empowered. In situations where there is a lot of corruption, government officials often demand bribes to approve the management plans, permits, and licenses. For community forestry to really work on a large scale you need a system that is simple enough for communities to understand and control. You can still have rules but they should be simple rules, without a lot of paperwork.

Obstacles: Too much bureaucracy and paperwork Policy and practice also suffer at this early point from a tendency towards overcomplicated procedure in the establishment of local roles, responsibilities and rights. Demands on communities to conduct surveys, plan and implement boundary demarcation, zoning, protection and similar often go beyond the requirements that administrations have conventionally placed on themselves, have actually implemented in the forests they manage or currently demand of private sector managers The result may be time-consuming, expensive and discouraging for local actors.

Obstacles: Communities get the worst Many community forestry programs only give communities the right to forests that have already been heavily degraded or completely destroyed. This makes it very difficult for them to benefit from the forests, at least for quite a number of years, until the forests are rehabilitated. Instead, local villagers are expected to invest their own time and energy into rehabilitating the forests. So instead of the programs helping to provide short-term livelihoods, they actually become a way to get the communities to subsidize the forestry services’ efforts to rehabilitate forests at a low cost. It is important that community forestry programs make rich forest resources available to communities for their use, both for subsistence and commercial sale. If one wants to improve farmers’ livelihoods, it is not enough to simply encourage them to plant trees and rehabilitate degraded forests.

Obstacles: Provoking conflicts between communities When governments give rights over forests to specific communities that allow them to get more money from them that often aggravates pre-existing conflicts. In many cases, communities have overlapping claims over forests but those overlapping claims did not create too many problems until the government gave the rights to one of the communities. This makes it very important to have a careful participatory process to demarcate the areas of each community and to resolve conflicts resulting from overlapping claims. One also needs to make sure to protect the rights of nomadic and migratory groups that may use forests, but don ́t live in any one particular location.

Obstacles: Lack of transparency in payments to communities Some community forestry programs lead to companies and governments making payments to traditional village authorities. Many times these village leaders take the money and use it for their own benefit without letting the rest of the people in the community know how much they have received and what they have used it for. It is very important for community forestry programs to let everyone know who receives money, how much money they receive, and what that money is supposed to be used for.

Obstacles: Over-emphasis on collective activities Collective activities are not always the best approach for community forestry. Sometimes it is better to work with individual families. This is particularly true when it comes to tree planting activities. Most community woodlots fail. At the same time, most small farmers plant trees. They deserve support in that process.

Obstacles: Lack of Implementation of Government policies & regulations Progress has been made in the creation of a legal and regulatory framework, including but not limited to the CRL and its regulations, draft Chainsaw Milling regulations, etc., in support of community forestry. However, these instruments need to be updated and improved in the face of a rapidly evolving community forestry learning environment. Among other issues; “commercial” forestry seems to be a taboo for communities to practice but the fact is that this could be of significant value to communities. the fee structure along the chain of custody creates incentives for wastage limitations are placed on the size of a community forest/ the size of a community forest is already predetermined by law There are good forestry laws and policies in Liberia that continue to need assistance with implementation. No law or policy is perfect, they need to be tested and refined; the CRL and CRL Regulations are among leading examples in Africa of forest rights decentralization and devolution

Obstacles: Limited capacity Limited capacity in terms of knowledge of the laws in place and the skills needed to support effective community forestry. Government is willing to support community forestry but is severely constrained in terms of human and financial capacity. Knowledge of the laws governing community forest management are not yet widely understood or utilized.

Obstacles: Threat of private-sector actors Agro-industry (oil palm plantations, etc.), large-scale logging , mining and conservation interests may clash (or be seen to clash) with the community forestry agenda. Forest-dependent communities – about 80% of Liberia’s population – need a way to legally defend and benefit from the land on which they have lived for centuries so that their main means of survival is not taken away by concessions.

Obstacles: Lack of Gender Equity and the potential for Elite Capture Gender equity is still a challenge in forest management planning and decision making. The forest sector is still struggling to develop its own framework for integrating women in forest resource management decision-making. There is a continuing need to identify and address linkages between community forestry, rural poverty, and equitable outcomes.

Obstacles: Elite Capture Community forestry endeavors must ensure equity in the sharing of benefits derived from sustainable forest management, particularly for poor and marginalized groups. Elite capture in community-based forest management areas is common, given that an overwhelming majority of people in such communities are poor, uninformed, and can easily be bought or misled by local, national, and international elites in the sector.

Obstacles: Lack of Value-Added Processing Round logs continue to be exported with no value added. Need to integrate value addition in community forestry. Need to develop a legal and regulatory framework for processing, transporting and marketing timber from community forests.

Obstacles: Lack of inter-governmental agency coordination Ministries of Agriculture, Lands, Mines and energy, and FDA disagree on the use of our forests. These overlaps of government approved operations are confusing, resulting in conflicts between communities and concessions operators.

Obstacles: Lack of Replicability Too many pilot projects have invested inordinate amounts of time and money on extensive studies, surveys, and inventories that are difficult to replicate and have, more seriously, lost critical opportunities to develop approaches that do not require sophisticated tools. Survey-driven projects may be unintentionally disempowering rather than empowering of local-level engagement, as community members await the findings of experts for studies in which they have only supporting roles.

Obstacles: Lack of Dialogue between the Government and forest users FDA focused on a need to be able to ‘explain’ the meaning of agreements for acceptance, not on learning to work with the community to develop mutually agreeable arrangements. Although reflecting admittance by the government that communities do have a stake in the forest resource and should be compensated and even profit from the extraction of timber, the government has yet to fully engage communities in dialog that might mutually articulate the legitimate basis for these benefits.