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Connecting Community Forests in DRC: Some Initial Ideas

Introduction and background to the report

To read the full report: Connecting Community Forests in DRC: Some Initial Ideas, by Hazel Rogers, Forests Monitor, October 2008.

Forests Monitor, with the assistance of DFID, and a range of partners have developed a joint proposal for a community forestry pilot project. As community forestry is an unfamiliar concept in DRC, it adopts a learning and experimental approach that plans to work closely with key stakeholders from government, civil society and the donor community to provide information to help with the agreement and implementation of supportive policy frameworks. It is one of a number of initiatives which represent the first contribution to the achievement of a long term goal for the widespread adoption of an appropriate system of community forestry for the DRC that is able to address poverty and empower rural communities to sustainably manage their own forests and revenues. A wide definition of community forestry (sometimes called “social forestry” or community based forest management) is used so as not to limit possible options. It envisages the control and management of forests by rural people, in their own interest, where the actual exploitation of resources (timber, PES, NTFP, tourism) can be made by the community itself by a community based enterprise or outside enterprises under a fair contract with the community. Developing community forestry is integral to the desire of the DRC government to find alternative ways to manage and economically use their forest resources.

Part of the original concept and vision of the proposal placed an emphasis on connecting community based producers with international markets in timber, environmental services (with a focus on carbon) and other non timber forest products. As well as being inspired by new potential opportunities generated by climate change, the idea is to provide an alternative to the DRC’s reliance on the industrial forest logging concession system. The aim is to introduce a way to achieve transformational development that can address poverty by enabling forest communities to capture real and direct benefits from assets in their environment as well as contributing to long term national development. However, the circumstances of the DRC suggest that connecting with international markets will feature in the later sections of any road map to develop community forestry. That said, the purpose of this paper is to reflect on ideas that offer a vision of how the latter part of that road map could look. This offers a number of advantages. A reality check of what is achievable in the short and mid-term; a clearer idea of some of the hurdles that need to be overcome; how these may relate to possible activities earlier on in that roadmap; and finally and importantly, a degree of encouragement and direction to the key stakeholders, particularly the DRC government, given the lengthy and demanding reforms they will need to invest in to develop a forestry sector based on a thriving medium, small and micro enterprise culture.

The paper is divided into three chapters, the first and second of which can be read separately depending on the readers interest. The first looks at the potential for community forestry initiatives to sell carbon. It will argue that efforts to develop community forestry in the DRC should focus on timber, NTFP and agriculture in the first instance on the basis that there is too much uncertainty about the nature of any carbon market and the DRC’s participation in it. In so doing, it will consider the prospects of a carbon market for standing forests emerging, the form it may take, the capacity of the DRC to participate, the role of community forestry initiatives at sub-national levels and the prospective economic and social returns for communities. At each stage it will consider the implications both for the DRC and efforts to develop a system of community forestry. The chapter will conclude by making a number of recommendations for future action to ensure that community forestry features in the debates and negotiations that are, and will be, occurring both in the DRC and internationally as the stakeholders work towards resolving these many uncertainties. The second goes on to look at some of the challenges of developing a system of community forestry that is able to access international markets, primarily through timber and NTFPs, but which could also be used as the basis for REDD payments. In so doing it develops some ideas for coordinating the enterprise activities of small community forest enterprises over the short and longer term. A third chapter makes some recommendations of relevance to the proposed FM pilot project.