What is community-based forestry and
what is this course about?
Dr. Wangari Maathai
won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable
development, democracy and peace.” While
she is accomplished in many areas, this award honors her for founding
the Green Belt Movement which, over the course of 30 years, has
mobilized poor
women to plant 30 million trees in her native
(Quotes from the
official press
release of the Nobel Prize Committee.
See www. nobelprize.com)
Photo from www.greenbeltalliance.org
These words describe the goals and methods of
community-based forestry worldwide.
Community-based forestry promoters seek nothing less than to
secure
social and ecological well-being for all by working to enhance
participatory
decision-making and sustainable benefits at a local level which are
equitably
distributed.
In this course, community-based forestry is
studied as a
robust example of how sustainability can be achieved through
institutional
change. It is often said that forest
management is not about managing trees, but rather about managing
people. This course will focus on the
people,
policies and institutions which dictate the use of forest resources. It is fundamentally a policy course which
examines how people at the community level are working to co-manage
forests and
market forest products for sustainable social & environmental
benefits. Throughout the course we will
use community-based forestry as a way to explore three issues: a) how do communities, businesses and
government work together to manage common pool resources in ways that
promote
social and ecological well-being, b) how can good ideas and pilot
projects be
scaled up to change the dominant social-political-economic systems that
affect
natural systems, c) what are some of the social justice and diversity
issues in
resource management and how do community-based approaches address or
exacerbate
inequity? We will examine cases from