Forest Policies and Governance on an Uneven Playing Field: Barriers for a Sucessful CBFM in the Philippines

Abstract

"Forest policies and the institutions that implement them have historically been biased against rural communities. Even with the recent forest policy reforms that devolve 'bundles of rights' to local communities through the various government-initiated community-forestry arrangements in many tropical countries including Asia, the rural poor remains marginalized in the implementation process. Moreover, they struggle to compete with the other more powerful stakeholders on an uneven playing field of ethnic and other social-economic inequities and institutional hurdles. Scholarship on common pool resources led by the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom provides a formula in terms of the 'key design principles' (see for instance Ostrom 1990 and 1998) that offer solution to the problems and challenges associated with the governance of common pool resources such as community-managed forest areas. Building on these design principles, Inoue (2011) proposed a 'prototype design guidelines' for collaborative governance of forests to include 'graduated membership', 'commitment principle' and 'fair benefit distribution'. This paper examines how the Philippines? forest policies and its multi-tiered governance system employed on an uneven playing field continue to frustrate efforts to promote social justice and sustainable forest management despite recent tenure reform initiatives through the government's adoption of community-based forest management (CBFM) as the national strategy for forest management. Using two CBFM sites as case studies, the paper argues that certain institutional and socio-political barriers operate at various forest governance levels that are likely to impede the successful employment of Inoue's 'prototype design guidelines' at the local level. Radical institutional and structural reforms are therefore required at the different forest governance levels as a vital strategy to level the playing field and provide an enabling environment and hence increase the chance for a more successful employment of the design guidelines on the ground."