Forestry management through another lens Forests play a vital role in the provision of ecosystem services, but they’re also places where people live and work. We spoke to Professor Adam Pain about his team’s work investigating smallholder practices and new forms of land governance in Brazil, Nepal and Peru, and the wider importance of building research networks to encourage collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Many people across Brazil, Nepal and
Forest transitions
Peru live and work around forests, where they often cultivate and manage relatively small areas of land. The interests of these smallholders are not always compatible with the wider agenda of using forests as a carbon sink to mitigate the impact of climate change, while commercial interests are also keen to exploit natural resources like timber. “You’ve got the global interests of the climate change agenda, commercial markets in timber, and also smallholders. These are essentially the main stakeholders in forest management,” explains Adam. While smallholders clearly have a strong interest in maintaining and managing forests, the practices they use are often not widely appreciated. “A lot of what smallholders do is actually not recognised as forestry. It’s seen as something else that lies outside it,” he outlines.
A lot of the debate in this area has centered on the idea of forest transitions, which is related to the wider goal of reversing the decline in forest cover. However, this idea carries with it an enormous set of assumptions about the conditions under which forest areas increase. “Nepal has gone through a forest transition, in the sense that the overall forest area is increasing. However, it has happened under very different circumstances than in the West,” says Adam. While in the West the increase in forest size was driven in large part by economic shifts and the diminishing role of agriculture in the economy, Adam says this was not the main factor in Nepal. “Nepal is still a subsistence economy. The forest transition in Nepal has come about largely because of community forestry,” he explains.
the interests of the people who live and work there. As forests in Nepal have recovered, this has been accompanied by an agrarian crisis in the mid-hills, where many people have not been able to make ends meet. “Their access to forests has been restricted and there has been a process of labour out-migration due to a failing agrarian economy,” outlines Adam. This loss of labour has led to a retreat of the agricultural boundary, which has had wider consequences. “Trees have actually crept out of the formal forest boundary, down into agricultural land,” he continues. “That’s one important dynamic in Nepal. The situation is different in Peru, where agriculture is still expanding.”
There is abundant
evidence that the Amazon has been managed for hundreds of years through selective planting, enrichment, and intensive agricultural practices. The way in which forests are viewed by bureaucracies has been shaped more by international agencies and forestry departments rather than the people who actually live and work there, believes Adam. The interdisciplinary research team which Adam leads is investigating issues around smallholder practices, land governance and agricultural changes in Brazil, Nepal and Peru, with the aim of helping build a wider perspective on forest management. “The project is partly about using different lenses to look at what goes on,” he says. Forestry departments and bureaucracies have proved to be relatively poor managers of forests. “Often they don’t understand the complexity of landscapes and the specific context, whereas the people who live there do understand, because they live there and manage it,” says Adam.
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The ‘90s saw the emergence of democratic and social forestry movements in Nepal, as control of the forests came back into the hands of the people that traditionally used them. This has helped forests recover from the position in the ‘70s, when there was deep concern about the extent of deforestation. “Democratic de-centralisation has helped forests recover, particularly in the mid-hills,” says Adam. However, as forests have become more valuable, the forestry department has become increasingly interested in taking a greater degree of control. “There’s an ongoing debate between the forestry department and smallholders about their rights, as to who can manage the forests,” he says. The emerging market around carbon capture and sequestration opens up the possibility of using forests as a means to generate revenue, yet this is not necessarily in
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