There is hardly any doubt that the present centralised forest management and implementation systems adopted by the foresters have not been able to sustain the forests. This is manifest in the ongoing deforestation of 3.9 million ha per year in 1981-90 period (FAO, 1993). The failure is corroborated by Duncan Poore's revealing report that hardly a few percent of the rain forests of the world have been scientifically managed (Poore, 1989). Burgess (1989) reports the lack of seriousness in silvicultural work in most of the SE Asian rain forests. The implementation systems of forest cutting namely appointment of concessionaires as in SE Asian countries or use of parastatals such as Forest Corporations as in India have not been able to stop the deterioration of the forest environs, overcutting, encroachment, or corruption.
The new initiatives that have been taken by different governments have also not been very successful in stopping the ongoing deforestation. However, it is only now been increasingly realized that wherever management has been even partially decentralized to the level of the users, in effect not in rhetoric, the forests have showed definite signs of improvement. And yet, why is it that decentralization is not been taken up as an established paradigm to follow and even it is accepted, why is it done so slowly and reluctantly?
The reasons can be grouped under two categories. First are those which can be referred to as national in character and thus revolve round macro level issues. The others are those relating to issues noticed at the village levels, what can be referred to as micro level issues.
The macro level issues comprise the observed deficiencies in political will, policies and legislation, tenure, technology, offered organizational structure and bureaucratic apathy including the latter's counterfight to decentralization. The micro level issues include power usurpation by local elites, lack of incentives to users, failure to wean people away from forest dependency and lack of local participation.
6.1.1 Lack of Political Will
6.1.2 Lack of clear policies and legislation about devolution in forestry
6.1.3 Lack of clear tenure statements
6.1.4 Lack of Technology
6.1.5 Lack of Institutional Restructuring
6.1.6 Bureaucratic Apathy
Lack of political will can be best explained from the case of land reform in almost all the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. Most of the countries (India, Philippines etc.) swear by land reform. Legislation have been enacted in India, restricting holding of private area to a maximum with the intention of distribution of the surplus to the poor and the landless. And as of to-day, 40 years after the legislation has been passed, the reform has not been completed. In forestry, the government of India policy was to increase the percentage of forest to a minimum of 33% of the total land area. Yet, in the name of development, about 4 million ha of forests have been cut down to accommodate dams, roads, townships, refugee rehabilitation during 1956 to 1980. The government of Philippines has made tiers and tiers of decentralized units but no financial powers have been devolved on these tiers. Most of the financial resources have to come from the central government which means that the deconcentrated units are totally dependent on the largess offered by the centre. Investigations sponsored by the government have revealed that the concessionaire system of forest cutting is not conducive to good forest maintenance, but it continues uninterrupted in Indonesia. In Indonesia, the government has issued orders for the concessionaires to assist the neighbouring communities to develop economically. It is true that some of the concessionaires have helped in an unplanned manner with some philanthropic measures and not as a part of a legal requirement. But the government has not made any serious attempt to ensure them.
Except in Nepal, none of the countries in the region have a clearly enunciated national policy or legislation in respect of decentralization of forest management to the local level. It is true that JFM in India has made very significant progress in a number of states of India. The local people, where they have formed groups to protect and manage the forests have been given rights of the non-timber forest products as also a part of the final product. But this arrangement is based on an administrative order which may be easily contested in the court. The policy statements made on this behalf is vague and will not stand any scrutiny. The most important requirement namely an enabling enactment has not been as yet made.
In almost every country except in the Pacific island states, there is a lot of confusion about the customary rights of the people and that of the state on the forest land. For example, in Indonesia, the basic Agrarian Law of 1960 recognizes customary law as the basis of national land law, but at the same time basic Forestry law of 1967 have been invoked to disenfranchise the local people of their rights. This has been done for commercial timber operations or conservation (Lynch and Talbott, 1995). In India, the customary rights of the people for various forest products is being abolished as and when any national park, sanctuary, biosphere reserve or national heritage parks are established. Even in PNG, the recent law establishes that the owners can dispose of their products only through the parastatals. In Nepal, the tenure is clear but there is a provision that the tenure can be revoked if the people do not follow the guidelines. The decentralization of forest management has been revoked or drastically modified twice in the last 50 years and even now the villagers in Nepal during field interviews express apprehension that the present rules are also not going to stay permanently.
The technology adopted in the decentralization initiatives follow the pattern suitable for timber management. No matter what the needs of the people are, the final product of the forest management aims at generating timber/pole to supply urban and industrial needs. Generally speaking the local people require sustained supply of fuelwood, poles for construction, some small timber for plough pieces, grazing ground, tree to lop for fodder, and various types of non-timber forest products including herbal medicines.
If the forest is the first charge of the local needs as the India's recent policy states, why then there is no change in technology? If the governments believe in new initiatives, how is it that there are no large scale experiments for forest management to generate local needs. Why for example, there is hardly any work on shrubs and bushes that are most used by the people to cook their food (Banerjee, 1989).
The name of Forest Department is synonymous with forest policing. The continuing name 'Forest guard', a level in the forest organisation hierarchy, bears testimony to the statement. This policing behaviour is a legacy of the colonial period and has since been perpetuated in the post colonial era. Where some measures leading to decentralization and devolution have been introduced, the forest department structure and its activities have not been concomitantly altered. Decentralization with devolution have not been accepted as a new paradigm but as one of the many projects that the department takes on. It is mistakenly assumed that training of the staff without any change of the main structural edifice of the department is sufficient to deal with decentralized participatory forest activities.
As stated earlier, the policy supported by legislation in favour of devolution of authority to the users of forests in Nepal is very clear. The pace of transfer of forests to the users is however very slow. Similarly, in Thailand, only 119 villages have received the benefits of the forest village programme. The reasons for this lack of zeal is not far to seek. The first is the apprehension of the foresters that they will lose the proprietary powers over the forests so long held by them. And second that some have little faith that the people will really conserve rather than destroy the forest. After all a myth about the poor local people being responsible for deforestation has been created over time.
It does not mean that there are no bureaucrats who are not pressing for devolution of authority to the local people. The JFM concept and its implementation, that has now made such an important mark in India, was initiated by a government official (Satishchandra and Poffenberger, 1989). Today in India, there are hundreds of bureaucrats who are firm believers of the concept. Similarly, there are many in Nepal, China, Thailand and Philippines and also other countries of Asia- Pacific. But this group is small compared with the vast majority that are apathetic some of whom also play an obstructive role.
6.2.1 Usurpation by local elites and power brokers
6.2.2 Failure of weaning the people away from forest dependency
6.2.3 Lack of incentives for Users
6.2.4 Neglect of Indigenous technology and local needs
6.2.5 Lack of Local participation
In places where the decentralization and devolution at least in terms of policy and enactments have been successfully carried out, there has been a common problem of local elites and power brokers usurping the powers and the benefits that should have been equitably distributed. This is also true of the traditional group structures. This usurpation is really a miniature version of the state or the national assemblies which are democratically ruled in name but lorded over by corrupt politicians or army personnel. Although the democracy has degenerated substantially in many countries, the system as we understand it namely free election of legislators to represent the people who have voted them to power, can perhaps be improved, particularly because democracy has checks and balances and has high visibility. This system of management by a democratically elected committee however is not replicable in decentralized units, if the decentralization is reduced to the village or users level. These units are inhabited by poor, marginal or landless people who occupy the lowest rung of the society and have been exploited for ages. Unless supported by outsiders and a sound system ensuring equity is established, they fall a victim to the more prosperous, educated and vocal section of the group. The nature of committee management therefore has to be altered.
As discussed earlier, an alternative paradigm is being introduced in the recent past for the conservation forests. This is referred to as eco-development. This aims at reducing or eliminating the forest dependency of the people living inside or in the periphery of the conservation forests by promoting economic development of their village. The assumption is that when these people have an alternative source of income, they will not use the forests. The idea is flawed for a number of reasons. The first is that the number of forest dependent people is enormous. An estimate of people dependent directly on forests is about 420 million in India, Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand alone (Table 1). Economic development of such an enormous number is beyond the scope of forestry projects. The second is that in these projects, the amount being invested per village is paltry and can just touch the fringe of the poverty of these people and they at best will accept this development as an additionality to their income, not as an alternative to their forest dependency. Eco-development therefore, cannot be a substitute for transfer of rights to forest management.
More often than not, the decentralization and devolution in forestry as has been introduced in the new initiative programmes, is not accompanied by satisfactory incentives to the users on whom the authority is supposed to be vested. The central authorities expect more services from the people than what it is prepared to pay for. The people are expected to protect the forest with immediate effect but they will have to wait for 5 years before they are entitled to collect any forest timber as per the JFM agreements in West Bengal, a pioneer in JFM. The forests that are allowed to be used by the people are the most degraded ones while the ownership and management of productive forests continue to remain with the state, as in Nepal terai and Indian states. This means that the earning that the users are entitled to will be little, while the government will not part with a share of the fat revenue that the government earns from the adjoining valuable forests. Better incentives are imperative to promote participation of the people in the management.
The local people use the forests to satisfy their family needs of the forest products. These include fuelwood, small timber, constructional timber, herbal medicine, food, fibre, and cattle feed including grazing. Besides, they use the forest land for shifting cultivation to grow subsistence food. And when there is demand in the forest vicinity for these products, they also collect for local sale. The Forest Department on the other hand had been and still is focused on production of the demands of the urban and industrial sector. In a few countries (Thailand), in Java of Indonesia, attempts are being made to introduce taungya system (a type of agroforestry and a distant variation of shifting cultivation) but the more common endeavour is to convert the shifting cultivators to sedentary farmers. The technology adopted by the forest authorities for the decentralized forests is therefore very different to what is customarily practiced by the indigenous people. This is not conducive to get the participation of the local people in the management of the decentralized forest units.
The sustainability of decentralized forest units with devolution of authority is dependent on the participation of the users in planning, execution, supervision and monitoring. In spite of the rhetoric, in fact the participation has been very small. In India under JFM, except for the participation of the people in forest protection, hardly any input by them in planning (microplanning), execution and supervision is sought after or accepted. The forestry officials generally are reluctant to accept the advice of others, especially of the uneducated local people, on forestry management and its problems.
