In 2013, policy makers from the Brazilian State of Amapá launched regulatory reforms intended to streamline options to formalize smallholder forest management. This paper reviews that policy reform process and analyses observations from local stakeholders to identify lessons for the promotion of smallholder forestry. In 2014, 2017 and 2021, interviews were conducted with family timber producers and sawmill operators in floodplain communities and regional timber buyers to evaluate the impact of the policy reform on their operations. Interviews with policy makers sought to understand the rationale behind the reform and how the process played out. Although the r eform efforts were well intentioned, results illustrate how bureaucratic inertia and complexity obstructed efforts to simplify policy and how policy did not address smallholder needs. While the reforms did not have the intended effect, the case offers lessons for future policy reform efforts.

Community forest management (CFM) is promoted as a strategy to reach multiple development outcomes including the sustainable use of forest resources, forest conservation, poverty alleviation, and social equity through the devolution of rights to forest-dependent communities. Developing effective and equitable strategies to promote CFM requires consensus on its goals and the approaches for reaching those goals. Finding common ground among diverse actors involved in the promotion of CFM can be a challenge when their multifaceted expectations and beliefs are not explicitly enunciated or consciously expressed, obscuring contradictions, conflicting objectives, or even shared agendas. An initial step to reaching consensus would be to clarify the range of perspectives that exist to identify common ground and areas of divergent opinion. We report on an initiative applying Q-methodology as a means of identifying differing perspectives on CFM through interviews with 34 informants representing 6 stakeholder groups involved in the promotion of CFM in the Peruvian Amazon: Indigenous leaders, government policymakers, technicians from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), university professors, forestry students, and representatives of donor agencies. We found four different perspectives on what CFM should do: balance conservation with community rights, encourage capacity and enterprise development, technical oversight to protect forests on behalf of Indigenous communities, and support for grassroots Indigenous autonomy. These perspectives revealed differences in how conservation should be achieved and where balance between technical requirements, Indigenous environmental management, and stewardship practices should be favored. Despite different viewpoints, the perspectives also revealed shared understanding of CFM as a mechanism that could emphasize both supporting community rights and conservation goals. This example illustrates how Q-methodology can generate information on the range of perceptions underlying broad strategies such as the promotion of CFM that can facilitate dialogue around shared pathways and agendas.

From 2016–2019, the West African Forest-Farm Interface (WAFFI) project engaged with smallholder farmers in northern Ghana to explore mechanisms to improve the influence of under-represented peoples, particularly women, in decision-making processes and platforms that affect their access to natural resources. Through a multi-phase process of participatory activities, including auto-appraisal, participatory action research (PAR) and facilitated knowledge exchange, villagers and researchers worked together to document and develop a better understanding of the challenges and changes facing women and men in the region to generate social learning. Among these challenges, the degradation of forest resources due to over exploitation, weak governance and conflict of use over shea trees (Vitellaria paradoxa) were particularly important for women. The WAFFI approach created a scaffold for social learning that strengthened the capacity of local stakeholders to share their perspectives and opinions more effectively in multi-stakeholder forums and dialogue related to resource use and land use change initiatives.

Natural forest regrowth is critical for restoring ecosystem services in degraded landscapes and providing forest resources. Those who control tenure and access rights to these secondary forest areas determine who benefits from economically charged off-farm opportunities such as finance for forest restoration, selling carbon credits, and receiving payment for ecosystem services. We explore multiple dimensions of secondary forest governance in Peru, where the lack of official government statistics of the extent, geography, and ownership, coupled with low state capacity, prevents the development of governance structures that could stimulate their sustainable management. In this paper, we review the challenges to secondary forest governance, and the opportunities to strengthen it, focusing on beneficial outcomes for smallholder farmers. We characterize secondary forest types, extent, and persistence in Peru, followed by a presentation of the social dimensions of their governance. We identify four entry points for government to take action: national mapping of the socio-geography of second growth forest, regularize the property rights of untitled landholders, relax forest regulations, and provide incentives, not sanctions, for secondary forest management. Overall, we recommend folding secondary forest governance into a landscape approach. In Peru, strengthening local forest governance could help to drive benefits of climate change mitigation incentives directly to local forest stewards.

We are living in a time of crisis on planet Earth. Urgent calls for transformational change are getting louder. Technical solutions have an important role to play in addressing pressing global challenges, but alone they are not enough. After all, who decides what kind of transformation is needed, of what, and for whom? What principles guide those decisions, and how are decision-makers held accountable? This commentary article argues that these governance questions are central in any solution, in order to simultaneously address the planetary crises of forest and biodiversity loss and degradation and growing inequality. To this end, we examine governance in forests and around trees, in landscapes and on farms, through the lens of power and social justice. For applied research aimed at actionable solutions to these global problems, we propose a governance research agenda for the next decade that is both transformative and just.

On-farm timber production is an important subsistence and economic activity of smallholder farmers around the world. Farmer investment in wood production and the degree of formality in the sector depends on access to and conditions of the market, the nature of the regulatory frameworks that govern rights to and movement of timber, and access to financing. We evaluate the process of formalization of a thriving and adaptive existing supply chain for small-dimension lumber originating in the fallows of smallholder farmers in the Peruvian Amazon. Through field research over three years based in semi-structured interviews with diverse actors in the Amazon, we found that the supply chain for fallow timber is driven entirely by informal and some illegal transactions. A key reason for this is the lack of an appropriate regulatory mechanism by which producers can gain authorization to harvest and sell this timber. We identify conditions necessary to formalize this sector, and evaluate the degree to which these are met under several scenarios. We recommend that the state develop mechanisms that recognize property rights of long-term residents and establish a simple fallow forestry registration mechanism; and that local governments or non-governmental organizations adopt adaptive and collaborative approaches to support farmers and provide training, information and networking among actors. State recognition of and support for fallow forestry, coupled with producers organizing for collective action on processing and marketing their timber, could result in the formalization of a significant volume of timber, improvements in income security for rural people, and the development of local entrepreneurial activities.

REDD+ was conceived as a system of incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. While this could include many different types of interventions to reduce deforestation and degradation, a consensus has emerged that they should safeguard and "do no harm" to the forest-based livelihoods of local people. Many REDD+ projects have been designed to incentivize forest conservation and support local livelihoods by promoting sustainable use of the forest, hence increasing the revenues earned by local households from forest products. We examine two such projects in the Peruvian Amazon, using panel survey data from over 400 households gathered in 2011 and 2014. In the 3 years between surveys, we observed a severe decline in forest revenue. However, by using a BACI study design and matching, we show that this decrease was not caused by the REDD+ interventions. Thus, REDD+ "did no harm" to local people, at least in terms of forest revenues in the early phases of these two projects in the Peruvian Amazon.

servicios ecosistémicos y bienes valiosos. •El bosque secundario en Perú se ubica principalmente en paisajes agrícolas, en su mayoría como consecuencia del uso agrícola, y representa hasta el 45 % de la cobertura forestal total en algunos paisajes.•

Community forest management (CFM) has been promoted for decades as a way to merge environmental conservation with economic development and natural resource rights agendas. Yet many of these initiatives have also led to substantial socioeconomic and environmental trade-offs. We present a comprehensive global analysis of environmental, income and natural resource rights outcomes of CFM, using data from 643 cases in 51 countries. We find that while the majority of cases reported positive environmental and income-related outcomes, forest access and resource rights were often negatively affected by policies to formalize CFM, countering one of CFM's principal goals. Positive outcomes across all three dimensions were rare. We show that biophysical conditions, de facto tenure rights, national context, user-group characteristics and intervention types are key predictors of joint positive outcomes. These findings highlight key conducive conditions for CFM interventions, which can inform CFM design to ensure positive outcomes across multiple sustainability dimensions. An analysis of 643 cases of community forest management shows that most led to improved environmental and income outcomes, but access and resource rights often deteriorate when formalizing such management.

The Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism faces implementation challenges related to tenure security and governance institutions. In response, multiple regional climate mitigation initiatives have emerged. In Peru, indigenous networks have created their own Indigenous Amazonian REDD (RIA), an initiative aiming to strengthen property rights for native peoples. At roughly the same time, the Peruvian government launched the National Forest Conservation Program (PNCB), a conditional payment scheme aiming to encourage sustainable forest management. However, these initiatives must still overcome fragmented institutional governance of forests at the regional scale and continued challenges related to indigenous tenure security. This article examines how indigenous federations and the Peruvian government are attempting to implement these initiatives in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios to examine how challenges play out in practice. These cases illustrate the institutional gaps between national policies, regional capacities, and local needs and expectations. However, it also demonstrates how an innovative institutional partnership at the subnational scale may be overcoming some of these challenges.

Desde 1974, el gobierno peruano ha titulado a mas de 1300 comunidades nativas (IBC, 2016). Sin embargo, los cambios en las politicas vinculadas a este proceso limitaron su implementacion, dejando pendiente la titulacion de muchas comunidades hasta la actualidad (2018). El estudio “Titulacion de Comunidades Nativas – Avances y Desafios”, analiza los procesos de titulacion en las comunidades y sus consecuencias para sus habitantes y los bosques desde su perspectiva, a fin de mejorar las iniciativas en curso. Este informe resume los resultados de la comunidad Inkare.Inkare se fundo en 1989, fue reconocida en 1990 y titulada en 1991. Obtuvo la ampliacion de su territorio en 1997. En la actualidad (2018) su territorio esta georreferenciado y ha completado su inscripcion en SUNARP. Los resultados de la titulacion fueron positivos para la comunidad. La mayoria esta satisfecha con su implementacion y resaltan como principal resultado la formalizacion de sus limites territoriales. Las familias perciben que luego de la titulacion hay menos conflictos, sus derechos son mas fuertes y estan mas protegidos ante una disputa. Sin embargo, las vigilancias comunales son necesarias porque aun existen invasiones y extraccion ilegal de madera, temen que sus derechos puedan ser disputados y no reconocen el rol del Estado frente a estos problemas. Ademas, la situacion de los medios de vida y la condicion de los bosques han mejorado, aun tienen problemas para satisfacer de alimento al hogar, la mayoria opina que la situacion de la seguridad alimentaria mejoro y empeoro que hace 5 anos y existe un desbalance en la participacion de mujeres en las reuniones donde la comunidad toma decisiones.

Desde 1974, el gobierno peruano ha titulado a mas de 1300 comunidades nativas (IBC, 2016). Sin embargo, los cambios en las politicas vinculadas a este proceso limitaron su implementacion, dejando pendiente la titulacion de muchas comunidades hasta la actualidad (2018). El estudio “Titulacion de Comunidades Nativas – Avances y Desafios”, analiza los procesos de titulacion en las comunidades y sus consecuencias para sus habitantes y los bosques desde su perspectiva, a fin de mejorar las iniciativas en curso. Este informe resume los resultados de la comunidad Centro Chocote.Centro Chocote fue fundada por un hacendado que se establecio en estas tierras. En la actualidad (2018) su territorio esta georreferenciado y se encuentra en proceso de titulacion. Los resultados del proceso de reconocimiento y demarcacion fueron positivos para la comunidad. La mayoria esta satisfecha con su implementacion y resaltan como principal resultado la formalizacion de sus derechos territoriales. Las familias perciben que en este proceso hay menos conflictos y que sus derechos seran mas fuertes y estaran mas protegidos ante una disputa con la titulacion. Sin embargo, las vigilancias comunales son necesarias porque aun existen invasiones, temen que sus derechos puedan ser disputados y no reconocen el rol del Estado frente a estos problemas. Tienen superposicion de tierras con un foraneo que genera inseguridad entre los comuneros. Ademas, la situacion de los medios de vida y la condicion de los bosques no han mejorado, aun tienen problemas para satisfacer de alimento al hogar, la mayoria opina que la situacion de la seguridad alimentaria es la misma que hace 5 anos y existe un desbalance en la participacion de mujeres en las reuniones donde la comunidad toma decisiones.