Fair Benefits

While existing forest management practices provide short-term economic gains to a privileged few, community forestry secures a range of long-lasting benefits for the people who need them the most.

In forests throughout the Asia-Pacific region, high economic benefits have often motivated intensive short-term land use. These financial gains have come at the cost of sustainable land-use and security for the people living in and around forests.

Community forestry, on the other hand, can provide a range of holistic and long-term benefits for societies.

• Social benefits: Community forestry strengthens relationships and networks, empowers marginalized stakeholders, and enhances local institutions, increasing the number of people who gain from forest management.
• Economic benefits: Community forestry enables users to generate income and diversify their livelihood opportunities through the sale of forest products and access to environmental service markets. When done properly, it creates systems that allow benefits to flow more equitably to marginalized groups and the poorest of the poor.

• Environmental benefits: Community forestry maintains ecosystems, which provide important services such as soil health, air and water quality, and ecosystem resilience, ensuring that social and economic benefits persist over the long term.

Benefits provide incentives for forest management decisions. For smallholders and communities, they help offset the high costs of managing a forest, such as time spent negotiating property rights, designing management arrangements, and regenerating degraded resources. For governments, they help determine land management policy and approaches.

Forest benefits to communities depend heavily on external factors, including national governance and the condition of resources. For example, when governments impose restrictive regulations on timber use, or when they only provide severely degraded forests for local management, the forest users gain fewer benefits.

Meanwhile, governance within communities also affects the benefits that individuals receive. Successful community forests must establish equitable benefit-sharing systems and ensure fair distribution to marginalized groups, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor.

Our Work on Benefits

Because strong and secure rights, good governance, and fair benefits are the basis of sustainable forest management, these three underlying principles crosscut all of our work. Each of our projects incorporates these goals. Our work helps local people to:

Secure their benefits: We help marginalized groups secure strong and clear property rights to forestland through advocacy at a national level and capacity building at a local level. Property rights protect community projects and resources and make it more difficult for outsiders to usurp community benefits. Strengthening transparency and accountability also helps ensure that once rights are in place, they are protected by rule of law.

Use and distribute their benefits fairly: Those who manage a forest should benefit from their investment and work. Through socially inclusive and participatory approaches, we help communities establish equitable mechanisms to distribute revenue and benefits, with clear and simple procedures and institutional arrangements.

Enhance their benefits: One of the biggest challenges to community forestry in the region is that the initial quality of forests granted to user groups is often too poor to offset the costs of revitalizing it. While this remains a problem, RECOFTC works with user groups to enhance the benefits from forest resources they do have. We help communities to participate in more steps from forest to market, increasing the benefits they can capture along the way. We are also exploring ways communities can use trees as collateral for long-term credit, helping finance their initial investments in forests.