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Small-scale forest enterprises in Latin America: unlocking their potential for sustainable livelihoods














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    Book (series)
    A guide to multiple-use forest management planning for small and medium forest enterprises 2023
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    This publication discusses the concept, evolution, and requirements of forest management planning, focusing on multiple-use forest management and small and medium forest enterprises (SMFEs). Forest management planning is a document that translates forest policies into a coordinated programme for managing forests over a set period of time, integrating environmental, economic, and social dimensions. It serves various purposes, such as legal documents, concession agreements, and tools for sustainable forest management. Multiple-use forest management recognizes the diverse values and benefits that forests provide beyond timber, such as water regulation, climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and cultural values. Despite its challenges, forest management planning can contribute to sustainability and optimize the value derived from forests. SMFEs play a crucial role in supporting livelihoods and forest-based economies. However, barriers such as policy environments, lack of support tools, and management challenges need to be addressed. Forest management planning can help overcome these barriers by ensuring legal compliance, mitigating risks, promoting sustainability, and supporting marketing and value chain development. It is also a valuable tool for empowering local forest users, involving stakeholders, and negotiating benefit-sharing arrangements. The process of forest management planning involves gathering information, defining objectives, developing silvicultural and ecosystem services plans, creating a business plan, planning for unusual events, and establishing a monitoring system. It is an adaptive learning process that continuously evaluates and adapts plans based on the results of forest management activities. Stakeholder engagement is key to developing a socially acceptable forest management plan, starting with identifying stakeholders, creating awareness, informed discussions, and monitoring to keep stakeholders accountable for their agreed responsibilities. Negotiating expectations and building consensus helps identify conflicts and integrate qualitative data to improve decision-making in multiple-use forest management. In conclusion, forest management planning is essential for sustainable forest management, contributing to the well-being of communities, the environment, and the economy. This guide provides a framework for forest management planning, guiding forest managers through the planning process stepwise and providing advice on information sources needed during the planning process. The framework can be adapted to national and local contexts in line with relevant regulatory requirements.
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    Article
    Community capacity for social enterprise development: Empirical evidence from community forest enterprises (CFEs) in Cameroon
    XV World Forestry Congress, 2-6 May 2022
    2022
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    Community forest enterprises (CFEs) are emerging as sustainable options for local development, these enterprises trade to meet their social and environmental goals, thus characterizing them as social enterprises. However, knowledge of the capacity of these communities to develop and effectively manage CFEs is not well known. With inspiration from the organizational capacity theory, the asset-based community development (ABCD) theory, a framework for community capacity is developed. Based on data from a sample of 31 communities, principal component analysis, descriptive statistics, and the Pearson correlation test was used to evaluate community capacity and the relationship between dimensions of community capacity. The findings reveal that natural resource availability received the highest score (4.08), thus underlying the fact that these communities are endowed with natural resources that can propel their growth if managed sustainably. However, other dimensions of community capacity are poor, community capacity for partnerships and social networking was the lowest (1.33), followed by infrastructure (1.38), skills and knowledge of members (1.58) was equally very low with significant poor knowledge in enterprise development, marketing, and financial management. The overall sense of community was poor averaging 2.84 on a scale of 5, community capacity for financial management was equally not very good (3.94). Although participation was not very poor in most cases, women, youths, and minority groups need to be empowered further to participate actively in community activities. Correlation analysis reveals that some of these domains are highly correlated, thus when one is triggered, there is a positive spill-over effect on other dimensions. Financial management capacity, participation, leadership, and resource mobilization emerge as key dimensions that when triggered can have significant positive effects on other domains of community capacity. Keywords: Sustainable forest management, Governance, Education, Decent employment, Economic Development ID: 3486804
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    Book (series)
    Reforming forest tenure
    Issues, principles and process
    2011
    Secure tenure is an important prerequisite for sustainable forest management. More diversified tenure systems could provide a basis for improving forest management and local livelihoods, particularly where the State has insufficient capacity to manage forests. In the past decade many countries have initiated efforts to reform their tenure arrangements for forests and forest land, devolving some degree of access and management from the State to others, mainly households, private c ompanies and communities. This publication provides practical guidance for policy-makers and others concerned with addressing forest tenure reform. Drawing from many sources, including forest tenure assessments carried out by FAO in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Central Asia, it deduces lessons about what works and what does not, and why. It formulates a set of ten principles to guide tenure reform, and proposes an adaptive process for diversifying forest tenure in a context-appropriate way. The publication emphasizes that successful tenure reform is linked with reform in associated regulatory frameworks and governance arrangements, and must be seen in the context of a wider national development agenda.

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