The Role of Alternative Conflict Management in Community Forestry

The Role of Alternative Conflict Management in Community Forestry

Descripción

Environmental degradation evident in many countries today is often the result of conflict over access to forest and tree resources within communities, between communities, and between communities and outside entities. People in forest-based communities compete with one another for scarce forest resources for a variety of domestic uses, while at the same time growing needs of local rural and urban areas and of world markets have led to commercial exploitation of these same forests. Competition-le d conflicts are invariably complex because the different forest products have many different users, and decisions about use have long term effects. When national-level decisions and policies dealing with common resource management are made, they often ignore traditional rules of land and tree tenure. Growing inequity of access, as well as lack of confidence in future access, cause people to cut down forests and resist conservation efforts, as some individuals act in their own immediate interests rather than the community's long-term interests. Under such circumstances, traditional means of conflict management are often ineffectual in dealing with natural resource disputes; the resulting sense of powerlessness leads to estrangement of local communities from the national political process. At the same time, government agencies attempt to impose their authority upon local communities, for example by limiting forest access to larger entities to whom they provide permits, often with little success in controlling either local or external use. In the conflicts that ensue, between parties of such uneven power and with such disparate viewpoints, it is not only the environment that suffers.