Incentives and Constraints of Community and Smallholder Forestry

Abstract

This editorial introduces the special issue: Incentives and constraints of community and smallholder forestry. The special issue contains nine papers, listed in a table in the main text. The editorial reviews briefly some key elements of our current understanding of community and smallholder forestry. The editorial also briefly introduces the nine papers of the special issue and points out how they link to the debate among academics and specialists on community and smallholder forestry. Finally, the editorial highlights the new elements that the nine papers contribute to our understanding of community and smallholder forestry, before it concludes at the end.

What drives smallholder tree growing? Enabling conditions in a changing policy environment

“…In the context of tree growing, proximate factors are those described as sectoral enabling environment and incentives: proximate factors are induced by the actors involved, and they are temporarily and spatially closer to the outcome to be explained, and thus the causality with the outcome is more clearly explained compared to remote factors. The factors included in the analytical framework were formulated based on previous qualitative research on enabling factors for smallholder tree growing (Byron, 2001;de Jong et al, 2016;Enters et al, 2003;Haltia and Keipi, 1997;Pokorny and Jong, 2015) and on findings from the fieldwork, and they are presented in Figure 1. '…”

Regulatory Tools, Effective Markets, and Private Sector Participation in the Forestry and Wood Products Processing Sectors

“…Following the 1990s sustainable development trajectory, many countries started making their regulatory frameworks more suited to smallholders and traditional indigenous groups. Notably, the focus has been on community forests, defined as "authority granted to communities to manage areas of forests, the purpose of which is to derive socio-economic benefits but constrained by the condition that forests must be conserved in order to provide ecosystem services and benefits to non-local users" (De Jong et al 2016). Unfortunately, such initiatives did not always result in a simplified framework, but added instead a new set of bureaucratic processes and hurdles.…”

Community Forestry and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Two Way Street

“…In steps 1-3, we relied on our shared understanding of what constitutes CSF, which is based on a profound understanding of the literature on CSF, including literature to which all of the five authors of this paper have made significant contributions, e.g., [10,[13][14][15][26][27][28]. We reviewed each SDG and target, and assessed to what extent CSF, if undertaken successfully, would make a contribution and how.…”

“…The second objective is to illustrate how efforts to support CSF, in order to favor desired outcomes, often align with the pursuance of a number of the SDGs. By achieving these two objectives, the paper also hopes to forge stronger linkages between the discussion on SDGs with ongoing debates on sustainable forest management and forest-based development, e.g., [10,13,15].…”