Challenges of community forestry in tropical America

Community forestry is seen as a promising option to improve the often-precarious situation of rural families while at the same time contributing to conserve forests. National and international organizations are promoting community forestry, aiming for a clear set of features that include: legal forest use, reduced impact harvesting, commercialization in non-local markets, and technical training services.While some successful experiences and achievements can be reported, most community forestry initiatives confront severe challenges and only continue while being externally supported. A review of experiences with community forestry in tropical America suggests that to better respond to local realities, community forestry has to shift from transferring externally defined technologies and schemes for social organization to strategies for facilitating communities to develop and implement their own aspirations and vision on local forest management. This means that efforts to adapt community forestry to external concepts need to adapt itself as true support of local interests and capacities