Direct Independent Study

”EVALUATIONS ON COMMUNTY FORESTRY”

By :
Ibnu Riyadhie Prayanda
1621631001
Introduction
Why evaluating the outcomes of community forestry? Over the past few
decades, the program has been promoted as an innovative and potential
approach to improved forest management and conservation strategies with a
comprehensive blend of ecological and socio-economic objectives.
Such has made evaluation on the outcomes of community forestry is still highly
appropriate that eventually encourages us to involve ourselves in the procedures
on the evaluation.
Field tests on two West Sumatra community forestry cases show that our
approach provides meaningful feedbacks to policy makers on how far the
objectives were reached and helps them to chart out a course of action (Garcia
and Lescuyer, 2008) so that community forestry can produce the potentials it
holds.
The concept of community forestry
Over the past few decades, community forestry has been placed at the top
of priorities of forest policy makers (Gauld, 2000) to tackle forest
degradation and the pervasive rural poverty in one single package of
program by mobilizing local people, particularly those heavily depend on
the resources and directly use them (hereafter we refer to as ‘direct forest
users’) through democratic processes of program formulation and decision
making as well as the implementation of the forest activities.

With such a consideration, this paper thus defines community forestry as:
“forestry practices which directly involve direct forest users in common
decision making processes and implementation of forestry activities”.
Community forestry outcomes and the key elements
of evaluation
As has been mentioned in the earlier section, community forestry is very much connected to the following three
objectives

1. Poverty alleviation of direct forest users  That community forestry has been widely promoted is
coined with the pervasive poverty in rural areas in the forest vicinity. Westoby (1987: 291) trenchantly
criticizes forest activity by external stakeholders that “its contribution to improving the quality of rural
life and raising the welfare of the rural masses has been negligible.” While the problems of the poverty of
forest dwellers have been long raised, they persist. Hobley (2007: 4) rhetorically asks “why, if this was so
clearly the case 30 years ago, we are still repeating the same mistakes with the same consequences”.

2. Empowerment of direct forest user  As earlier said, the enthusiasm on community forestry has
been linked mainly with the premises that ‘forest communities’ are closely attached to the surrounding
forests, not only for their daily livelihood but also for cultural and even religious lives.

3. Improved forest conditions  For the evaluation of the ecological outcomes of community forestry,
we also need to highlight that degraded forest condition is one of the main drivers of the implementation
of the program.
Testing the approach
From the outset, instead of promoting genuine empowerment, the
community forestry scheme limits the involvement of the locals only to
the functional participation which sees the people as the medium for
executing pre-determined objectives and decisions (Hobley, 1996).

For instance, prevents tenurial claims over the forestland as the users are
bound to acknowledge the state's ownership over the forests despite
some sporadic aspirations on foreseeing ownership rights over the
forests (see Fuadi and Rahman, 2004). Access on the decision-making
procedures is limited to the extent that the locals have to follow
management procedures regulated in the HKm licenses.
 In fact, the community forestry scheme rests on the granting of two different
licenses to the users and their groups, i.e. 1) the management license — which
focuses on the management of the forests and the uses of the forestland, and 2)
the utilization license for timber harvests. According to the Ministerial Regulation
No: P.37/ Menhut-II/ 2007, the users and their groups have to submit different
working plans to the Ministry for securing both licenses.
Conclusions
As any form of assessment, evaluation on community forestry outcomes aims
to observe whether the program has produced the impacts as initially
intended. In evaluating the outcomes, we propose an approach that is based
on the core policy objectives of the program, i.e. poverty alleviation, and
empowerment of direct forest users as well as improved forest conditions.
Based on a test in two community forests in Indonesia (Indudur Village and
Batu Busuk Village), the focus on the core policy objectives appears to
provide a more practical approach than the use of complex criteria and
indicators. While similar field tests on other community forestry practices at
different contexts are indeed needed, we conclude that our approach allows
rapid evaluations and eventually reduces the associated costs and time without
compromising the goals of the evaluation