From Community Forest to Citizen’s Forest: Lessons and Strategies learned from Transitions to Sustainable Development of Forest Management

Abstract

Community forests are lands whereby the local community members play a significant role in forest management. With an aim to reduce poverty, ensure food security and maintain a balanced ecosystem, community forestry is participatory and should serve all community members equitably. However, the forest management system of Thai Government is centralization system, especially in the Conservation Forest or Protected Areas. Therefore, the community rights have been not recognized by Thai government. After the crisis of the rights for forest management, the “community forest movement” has become increasingly active in Thailand.

Although, community rights movement has attempted to bring about policy change toward forest management over the past thirty years, the end result is that today there is no Community Forestry Bill in place. Many failures in community forest management have occurred because local people were marginalized from decision making. Moreover, local people are not the only key players in forest management, but also all stakeholders (including private sector, civil society, and government) should recognize their rights to a sustainable livelihood. Then, the next step of community forest movement should disseminate models of community-based forest management to other social groups in order to promote the Citizen forest.