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BRIDGING THE GAP: COMMUNITIES, FORESTS AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS

By Marcus Colchester

Community Forestry is seen today as vital to the promotion of 'sustainable development' in forests. Over the past 25 years, community forestry has transformed 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 have played a key role in this transformation. Based on a review of ten networks involving seven countries, a recently completed study carried out for CIFOR compiled the main lessons learned from this experience in terms of advocacy effectiveness, communications techniques, network governance, relations with donors and linkage to social movements. The increasing mobilisation of community-based organisations means that supportive NGOs and government agencies now need to play a different role to the one they gave themselves 25 years ago.

Impacts
The ways that international networks have contributed to community forestry are very diverse. Few networks can claim to have had direct impacts at the local level, except through a handful of pilot projects, but then few of the networks sought to achieve change this way. Most of the networks have focused on providing information and services to national level actors to raise awareness, and build consensus, and to arm them with the information, arguments, knowledge, techniques, resources and skills needed to promote national and local change. These contributions have been so various and diffuse, and often indirect, that drawing up a balance sheet of the costs and benefits of networking is impossible. It has become clear that the collective result of all this networking has been helpful in many countries and crucial in some others, especially those where donors also exert considerable influence. The gains attributable to the networks in international forest policy-making are both more evident and less certain, as for the most part these gains have not yet discernibly influenced national policy reforms, let alone had local effects. Not enough seems to have been done to insert these international policy gains into national reform platforms. A cumulative result of all this networking and advocacy has been a growing global acceptance of the validity of community forestry. New ideas of how to promote it have opened up space to local communities to reassert their rights, revalidate their institutions and customs and adapt to changing conditions.

Key lessons for networks

• Consensus-building networks that seek to include actors from communities, NGOs and government do have an important role to play, but they need to recognise their limitations and distinguish themselves from locally driven networks that are run by the community representatives. Supportive NGOs must also take care not to substitute themselves for local actors.
• Networks also need to recognise the inherent limitations of the networking endeavour and not exaggerate the extent to which they are genuinely democratic and inclusive. De facto networks cannot effectively include more than around 50 individuals or organisations in routine collective decision-making. Trust in a smaller group of leaders is essential. Every network needs to accept that there is an inherent tension between maintaining informality and flexibility and adopting structures and decision-making processes that ensure transparency and accountability. In choosing their governance structure, networks need to weigh up the pros and cons of different ways of working and have clear reasons for whatever structures they choose.
• Maintaining trust and links with and between communities requires substantial investments of time and resources. Over-reliance on computers - email and the web - for communications will exclude the effective participation of community organisations in many countries for the foreseeable future. Networks need to think through carefully their communications strategies to ensure they do reach those they claim to include. Face-to-face meetings and exchanges, investment in translation and interpretation, and the modest use of newsletters as ends rather than means, have proved their worth and need adequate financing, while some of the new technologies and techniques seem worth experimenting with further.
• In connecting to national and local levels, networks generally have relied too much on a single national or regional focal point for communications: they need both to resource these partners more adequately so they can fulfil their onerous role and find other, complementary means of linking to national and local actors.

Lessons for donors
Community forestry and community forestry networking require sustained support if they are not to wither away. More support is needed to build up social movements and community-based networks, even those that are critical of government and aid agency policies. The challenge is to support the networks in ways that promote accountability without imposing artificial goals, targets and structures. Support needs to be long-term and should demand less pre-programmed 'outputs'. It should aim for good processes rather than results-focused projects; for inclusive sharing and decision-making as much as for specific publications and pre-determined advocacy goals. Participatory monitoring and evaluation has proved its worth to help networks reflect on the extent to which they are being effective and are genuinely reaching those they seek to include.

Conclusion
Now that participation has become a norm in development discourse and even practice, the time has come for a much more critical evaluation of the form of this participation. Multi-stakeholder decision-making, new partnerships, routine engagements with civil society all promise new opportunities for local actors to get their voices heard. But there are also risks that these same processes are creating new divisions and possibilities of social exclusion. The community forestry networks and the social movements that they claim to support both need to be vigilant to ensure that they engage in these processes astutely, using political space that is offered in ways that do not legitimise unacceptable practices or that exclude the rural poor in whose name community forestry is advocated.

Reference:
Colchester, M., Apte, T., Laforge, M., Mandondo, A. and Pathak, N. (2003). Bridging the Gap: Communities, Forests and International Networks . Centre for International Forestry Research, Bogor. Available: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/CF/Synthesis.pdf

Further information:
Dr Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme
1c Fosseway Business Centre, Stratford Road
Moreton-in-Marsh GL56 9NQ, UK
E-mail: marcus@fppwrm.gn.apc.org

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