Assessment of Portuguese Community Forestry using the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure and FAO Community-Based Forestry Framework

Abstract

In the last five decades, Community-Based Forestry (CBF) has become a subject of special attention. It is assumed that the transfer of rights to local communities will improve forest management. In Portugal more than 13% of the forest area belongs to local communities (termed baldios). Following FAO tools, assessments of Forest Tenure and CBF were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of four baldio management types. The results revealed the most common challenges for baldios, visa -vis, rights associated with their management, protection of these rights, weak land administration, weak mechanisms for conflict resolution, problems with decentralized state support, cash flow management, and environmental challenges leading to wildfires, loss of biodiversity, and inadequate control of pests and invasive species. Resolution of these challenges is urgently needed at the legal, administrative and local levels. Future research should include assessments of CBF in other European countries to reduce the existing knowledge gap.

Relationships Between Wildfires, Management Modalities of Community Areas, and Ownership Types in Pine Forests of Mainland Portugal

“…Our results agreed with the findings of a qualitative assessment of the 40-year experience of community-based forestry in Portugal (Skulska et al 2020), which showed a wildfire increase, in the recent decades, in all the modalities. These results pointed toward the need for using mixed and comparative approaches (qualitative and quantitative) in research focusing on community forest management.…”

“…Communities from modalities 1 and 2 were in a more difficult position from this aspect. They invested less in forestry because of the high fire risk level and the lack of technical support in forest management (Skulska et al 2020), as the support from the baldio associations was limited.…”

“…This indicated that co-management with the Forest Services had advantages in terms of fire management, but these advantages were considerably more apparent in the first period. According to Skulska et al(2020) these differences might be attributed to the complexity of the management structure, the proactivity of baldio managers, and the bureaucracy associated with the modalities. In fact, the co-managers of modalities 1 and 3 (commoners and local authorities) emphasised the excessive bureaucracy and the recent lack of pro-activity by the Forest Services as a co-manager in the recent years.…”

Forests in common: Learning from diversity of community forest arrangements in Europe

“…Numerous examples across Europe illustrate the wider relevance of this point. In Portugal, traditional commons known as baldios were afforested by the State, but returned to local government ownership in 1974, with mixed results (Skulska et al 2020 ). In Spain, by the late eighteenth century, politics did not recognise community ownership as a form of property, and forest commons were privatised with resulting loss of forest (Guadilla-Sáez et al 2020 ).…”

Enhancing Sustainable Management of Public Natural Forests Through Public Private Partnerships in Kenya

“…Other studies related to the preconditions that spur private investment and which could be related to contextual factors affecting public private partnerships shows how macro-economic policy regime in a country impedes or promotes vigorous growth in the private sector and by extension the associated partnerships. Skulska et al (2020) indicates that sometimes the macro-economic policy regimes may grant special temporary benefits for new investments, without altering much the general macro-economic and institutional environment or making those benefits permanent. According to Skulska et al (2020), this encourages the pursuit of short-term investment advantages, but hardly promotes long-term growth or investments.…”