Browsing by Author "De Foresta, Hubert"

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Domestic Forests: A New Paradigm for Integrating Local Communities Forestry into Tropical Forest Science
(2007) Michon, Genevieve; De Foresta, Hubert; Levang, Patrice; Verdeaux, Francois
"Despite a long history of confrontation between forest agencies and forest people, indigenous or local practices are increasingly considered as a viable alternative of forest management. This paper is a synthesis derived from various long-term research programs carried out by the authors in Southeast Asia and Africa on forests managed by farmers. These researches looked at local practices and underlying science, including their social, political, and symbolic dimensions. They also addressed evolutionary trends and driving forces, as well as potential and limits for forest conservation and development, mitigation of deforestation, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation in a context of global environmental, political, and social change. We discuss how forest management by local communities, contrary to the unified models of professional forest management, exhibits a high historical and geographical diversity. The analysis we draw from the various examples we studied reveals several invariants, which allows proposing the unifying paradigm of domestic forest. The first universal feature concerns the local managers themselves, who are, in their vast majority, farmers. Management practices range from local interventions in the forest ecosystem, to more intensive types of forest culture, and ultimately to permanent forest plantation. But in all cases, forest management is closely integrated with agriculture. The second universal feature concerns the conceptual continuity of planted forests with the natural forest, in matters of vegetations structure and composition as well as economic traits and ecosystem services. The resulting forest is uneven-aged, composed of several strata, harboring a large diversity of species, and producing a wide range of products, with timber seldom being the dominant one. The term domestic forest aims at highlighting the close relationship the domestication process establishes between a specific human group, including its elementary units, the domestic units, and the forest, transformed and managed to fulfill the needs of that group. The domestic forest paradigm calls for the integration into forest science of a new concept of land management in which production and conservation are compatible, and in which there is no choice to be made between people and nature. It does not aim at contesting the value of conventional forest science, but it proposes domestic forests as a new scientific domain, for the combined benefit of forest science and of forest people. It does not contest the value of conventional forest management models, but pushes towards more equitable relations between forest agencies and farmers managing forest resources on their own lands."
New Face for Traditional Commons: Forest Conversion and the Redefinition of Common Property and Individual Rights through Agroforest Development in Sumatra, Indonesia
(1995) Michon, Genevieve; De Foresta, Hubert; Levang, Patrice
"In Indonesia, conflicts between the State and local communities concerning utilization and control of forest resources are increasing. As a result of existing legislation, market regulations and financial policies, dispossession of local communities and deregulation of traditional common property systems are becoming common cases all over the archipelago. But, parallel to the present dilapidation of misappropriated common property resources in natural forests, there is, sometimes for more than a century, a movement towards restitution of these resources in farming systems. In many areas, forest resources have been appropriated by local communities through special management systems which transfer them to agricultural lands and into agricultural systems but do not look like agricultural management. As pure forest reconstruction enterprises, these remarkable 'agroforest' systems associate the ancient forest management systems with a logic of commercial agriculture. They overall allow farmers to escape the contradiction existing between a national institutional framework which sharply limits access to natural forests and an economic reality which pushes towards intensive utilization of their resources. Through the history of an agroforest in Sumatra, through the analysis of interrelations between natural and social processes which shaped and sustain it, we shall discuss how this 'agroforest' concept can contribute to debates on use and dynamics of common property resources in forest areas, emphasizing biological and human aspects which allowed more than the conservation of one or another forest resource, the restoration of the forest resource itself in all its biological and economic diversity, we shall discuss the validity of this 'agroforest strategy' for re-appropriation of the ancient forest commons in a context particularly unfavorable to their maintenance in present resource management systems. "Accent will be put on the special socio-cultural aspects -perception of forest resources, representation of the agroforest vs. representation of the forest- and local institutional characteristics - modes of access, control and transfer for different types of agroforest resources - which make the originality of the agroforest management mode. Discussion will follow on the perspectives offered by the agroforest model for future negotiations between national government and local communities on the use of forest lands and resources."