Traditional versus New Forms of Community Forest Management in Vietnam: Can they Contribute to Poverty Alleviation in Upland Forest Areas?

Abstract

"In the early 2000s, the legal framework in Vietnam changed toward legal recognition of management of land and forest resources by communities. The change creates a potential for communities to benefit from forest use, and for forests to contribute to poverty reduction.

"Examples in various parts of the country show that forest-dependent people have long been able to not only organize themselves to manage their local forest resources for their (daily) use but also to develop an equitable distribution system of the benefits from forests. This paper introduces two concrete cases where local forest resources have been collectively managed by local people in Dak Lak and Thua Thien Hue provinces of Vietnam. While the two cases illustrate significant attention being paid to an equitable distribution of benefits from forest, they also demonstrate two quite different approaches to local forest governance.

"The Dak Lak case takes the audience to a village where community forest management has been recently introduced by a donor led development project. People in this village enjoy the legal recognition of their community forestry and commercial logging to timber from the forest. By contrast, the case of Thua Thien Hue introduces a village where local people have managed their forest for generations though no official legal recognition of this community forestry exists. People in the village have even developed concrete plans for management of the forest as well as for distribution of products harvested from this forest."