Rehabilitation and Restoration Of Degraded Forests (PDF) - IUCN

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Box 5. Forest dependence and decision-making Chapter 4: Why undertake forest landscape restoration? In many developing countries large populations of rural people live near forests and depend on them for subsistence and, sometimes, for commercial purposes. Many of these communities have had a close and long-standing association with the forests; until relatively recently, resource management in more remote regions was left largely in their hands. Often there were local institutional arrangements that defined access and use rights to the forest. Forests were often nationalised by colonial and post-colonial governments. This legally disenfranchised local communities, although in many cases they retained usufruct rights extra-legally. As state control spread, local communities came into closer contact with government officials. Tensions increased, particularly where upland land-use practices did not conform to those of lowland (mainly ethnic majority) farmers. Often, government officials didn’t appreciate the importance of forests to local communities in terms of food security, income, nutrition, employment, energy sources and overall well-being. The largescale exploitation of commercial timber from the forests during the past few decades brought few benefits to upland communities, who became even more removed from mainstream development. The current emphasis on rehabilitation of degraded forests provides opportunities to build new relationships between governments and local communities, based on collaboration rather than confrontation. This will require significant changes in attitudes and working relationships, as well as a continuing evolution of policy. Progress is likely to be slow, partly because of entrenched attitudes in the bureaucracy. Nonetheless, there seems to be an inevitability about the general direction of policy, with governments throughout much of the world devolving more rights and responsibilities to various members of civil society. Forest landscape restoration also seeks to foster a more participatory form of forest management. One of the lessons of development and of general land-use planning and management during recent decades is 23
REHABILITATION AND RESTORATION OF DEGRADED FORESTS that technical solutions alone can rarely resolve complex natural resource management problems. Virtually all land-use planning and management involves people as well as the biophysical landscape. Forest rehabilitation at both the site and landscape levels will affect different people in different ways. The practical reality is that, in many parts of the world, communities living adjacent to (or even within) forests are the de facto if not the de jure managers. Any approach that fails to involve people or take account of their various interests is unlikely to succeed. Significant changes are taking place in most countries in the way that central governments perceive and carry out their mandates of rural land-use planning and management. There is a shift towards decentralisation of government functions and some devolution of authority. In some cases this results in a shift in local decision-making and action to local communities. This brings into sharp focus the interactions between rural communities, the government and forests (Box 6). 24 Box 6. Restoration in the Buxa Tiger Reserve, India India’s Buxa Tiger Reserve, on the borders of Nepal and Bhutan, contains 37 forest villages, 25,000 people and around 100,000 cattle. It was initially protected in 1879 (the first reserved forest in India) and was included in Project Tiger in 1987. The reserve has serious social and ecological problems, and forest restoration is urgently needed. When commercial logging ceased in Buxa in 1987, it removed a major source of income for many villagers. The local forestry department (funded by the World Bank since 1997) is unwilling to move the villages outside the reserve. Since the villagers still live in the reserve, and have no alternate source of income, they have continued illegal felling, which has increased the overall rate of degradation. Any efforts at sustainable forest restoration must consider these socio-economic realities.
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