Putting the Community Back into Community Forestry:

The Enchantment of Collective Action for Timber Production in Latin America

David Barton BrayFlorida International University

“Taking Stock of smallholder and community forestry”

CIFORMontpellier, FranceMarch 24-26, 2010

The Uncertain Promise of Community ForestryDevolution of rights to forest resources an

uneven and in many cases disappointing process.

Most rights are for NTFPs, seldom more than safety net for the poor; or when more valuable, poor shut out of common pool resources.

Best forest poverty alleviation mechanism may be urban migration (Levang).

Payment for environmental services, the new NTFP, complicated and unpromising for poverty alleviation

And even doubts about community timber production

“natural forests lack comparative advantage for poverty alleviation”…if timber rents could be distributed even a minor amount poverty alleviation could be significant” (Wunder, 2001)

Little potential in timber due to “weak and slow-moving institutions, rent capture by local elites”…….etc etc timber not one of the “win-win” situations. (Sunderlin et al. 2005)

Mexican community forest enterprises “incipient in terms of business development” (my translation) (Sabogal et al. 2008)

Putting community back into community forestry, and organization back into institutional analysis

“community” disenchanted and deconstructed by Agrawal and Gibson (1999; 838 Google scholar cites) into “multiplicity of actors and interests” “a set of internal and external institutions”

But a community as “a spatial unit, a social structure, and set of shared norms” does exist.

A community is not just a “user group” or a “group of principals”

Timber Production: It takes a community

With the incentive for collective action of a valuable natural resource, some traditional and indigenous communities with rich social capital and organizational structures build upon and expand their ability to engage in community collective action.

Communities have “high entry and exit costs…effective multilateral enforcement of group norms…to overcome free rider problems…properties allowing them to persist in world of market exchanges and modern states…..” (Bowles and Gintis, 1998, 2002)

Institutions: It takes an organization It’s not just institutions: “It is the interaction between

institutions and organizations that shapes the institutional evolution of an economy. If institutions are the rules of the game, organizations and their entrepreneurs are the players.” (North, 1990)

Organizations come into existence within particular institutional constraints, but organizations become the major agents of institutional change. (North, 1993).

In Mexico, traditional and indigenous communites were endowed with a template for their governance structures, with both rules and a specific organizational form

Mexican Common Property SystemLegislated into existence (McKean and Ostrom, 1995).

Has neither “endured” nor “emerged” (Arnold, 1998), but on-going reality for most of 20th century.

A form of co-management, through forest use regulation, but with a privately held communal property.

“Second stage” of common property regimes: “a systematic focus on stakeholders in a common property resource responding go larger market opportunities as an alternative source of benefits provided by the common property asset” (Antinori, 2000). i.e. community forest enterprises (CFEs).

Mexican Agrarian Reform and the Redistribution of Natural Assets from the State and Private Sectors to

Communities

1940-18% of all forest lands

1950-23% of all forest lands

1980-65-80% of all forest lands

El Balcon, Guerrero: 1966-2,400 ha, 1974-19,150 ha, 1986-4,015

1971-in Chihuahua break-up of 261,000 ha private forest holding-distributed to communities.

How Did the Sector Emerge?

Table 1: Typology of CFEs by Collective Action Vertical Integration in Mexico1

Table 1: Typology of CFEs by Collective Action by Vertical Integration in Mexico

Level I

Inactive Communities: have had logging permits at some point during this period but were not logging in 2002.

Level II

Stumpage Communities: contract with third party logging companies to carry out the extraction. Commonly implies supervision of the logging process by the communities and community members being employed by the contractor.

Level III

Roundwood Communities: directly participate and own equipment that allows them to engage in some stage of the process of extraction, commonly includes ownership and operation of chainsaws, skidders, winches and logging trucks, frequently acquired successively

Level IV

Sawmill Communities: have sawmills and occasionally other levels of vertical integration that may include drying ovens, plywood factories, furniture factories or other value-added processing installations..

1993-2002 2,300 communities with logging permits in Mexico (CFEs)

State

Number of CFEs by Level of Integration (LI) and State in Ten Most Important Forest States (1992-2002)

Total Level I

Level II Level 3 Level 4 Unclassified Campeche 20 4 32 1 6 63 Chiapas 31 41 26 1 32 131 Chihuahua 24 60 73 51 31 239 Durango 56 143 69 42 11 321 Guerrero 57 41 15 10 4 127 Jalisco 34 105 8 5 5 157 Michoacán 40 164 21 12 9 246 Oaxaca 39 73 48 31 26 217 Puebla 25 3 107 3 9 147 Quintana Roo 30 6 37 7 2 82 Total 356 640 436 163 135 1730

Trends in Vertical IntegrationVertical Integration among CFE in Mexico

No.

of

Com

mun

itie

s

Levels of Vertical Integration

0

200

400

600

800

I I I I I IV

Vertical Integration among CFE in Bolivia

0

10

20

30

40

50

I II III IV

No. of

Com

munit

ies

Levels of Vertical Integration

Level of Integration by Total Community Area, Total Forest Size and Logging Area in Ten Most Important Forest States-Mexico

Level of Integration

Total Community Area

Average Forest Area Average Permitted

Logging Area Ha N ha n ha n

Level 1 9,601 268 4,948 281 807 286

Level 2 8,717 418 3,555 471 922 475

Level 3 8,955 345 5,454 365 1,553 363

Level 4 23,931 116 15,193 120 3,503 121

Organizational Structure of Level II CFE

Organizational Structure of a Level IV CFE (the emergence of “supercommunity” forest enterprises

A Small Percentage of Mexican CFEs have accumulated substantial fixed assets in the CFE and have become

internationally competitive timber businesses “supercommunity” forest enteprises

El Balcon, Guerrero: 4.2 million dollars in fixed capital assets

Organizational Structure of a Dissolved CFE (Timber rights informally parcelized among “work groups”

Community Forest Enterprises: Extending the Theory of the Firm (not an intermediate form)

Why did it Happen in Mexico?

A market culture

Strong existing form of community governance, institutions and organizations.

Clearly defined property rights to timber (but took historical struggle to achieve)

Formation of human and social capital (not “capacity-building”!)

Multi-scale governance, involvement of government and NGOs

Closing Thoughts IWhen you have an existing community (i.e.

Bowles and Gintis) with a strong form of organization, with secure access to timber and human and social capital training with a supportive policy environment astounding things can happen.

The collective action around timber then creates a stronger community.

“in a complex process of social reingeneering a new social order has been constructed” Claudio Garibay

Closing Thoughts II

“Far from being vestigial anachronisms, we think communities may become more rather than less important in the nexus of governance structures in the years to come, since communities may claim some success in addressing governance problems not amenable to state or market solution” (Bowles and Gintis, 1998:23)

One of those governance problems is optimizing forest cover and biodiversity and human welfare in forests; community forest enterprises for commercial timber production is one of the options to do it