Resource Use Rights and Other Challenges to Sustainability in Philippine Community-Based Forest Management

Abstract

"In 1995, the Philippines officially adopted Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) as its strategy for sustainable forest management in recognition of the urgent need to put 'social fences' in open access forests and forest lands. CBFM was conceptualized to partly respond to the issue of the state as being the biggest 'absentee landlord' by recognizing de-facto resource management of communities, including indigenous peoples (Hyde and others, 1996). Many foresters and environmentalists expected communities in CBFM areas would initiate effective actions that would minimize negative upstream-downstream and on-site-off-site impacts of forest management externalities (Wallace, 1993). Tenure, resource use rights, and support systems to communities were assumed to trigger self-perpetuating sustainable forests and forest lands practices. These were supposed to be the key incentives that would 'push' CBFM into the major landscape of forests and forest land management in the Philippines.

"Today, CBFM in the Philippines has become a strategy with multi-faceted perspective. From a largely forestry approach of rehabilitation that covers only individual/family upland farms or claims into one that ensures communal long-term tenure (and also addressing individual property rights within the communal tenure) encompassing larger forest areas and different land use mixes. Forests and forest lands of communities (both migrants and indigenous peoples) now include any or a combination of the following: (1) forestlands that have been planted or areas with existing reforestation projects, (2) grasslands that are quickly becoming the expansion area of upland agriculture, (3) areas with productive residual and old-growth forests, and (4) multiple-use and buffer zones of protected areas and watershed reservations (Borlagdan 1996; Guiang, 1996; Pulhin, 1998)."