Abstract
Forests in developing countries provide multiple livelihood opportunities and ecosystem services from the local to the global scale. However deforestation and forest degradation are ripe across many developing countries. An increasing proportion of forestland in developing countries is either owned by or designated for the use of communities. The ensuing
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governance arrangement: community forestry management (CFM), has been gaining prominence since the 1980s in both policy and scientific debates. CFM entails communities living in or near forests collectively crafting, maintaining and modifying prescriptions and rules on access to and withdrawal from forests, known as forest institutions. Common Pool Resource (CPR) scholars have greatly contributed to a rich academic understanding of community self-governance in a CFM context, especially in developing countries. The ambition of this dissertation is to expand the CFM debate to include situations in which pure self-governance is not evident. Many CPR and international development scholars have observed the vast number of state and civil society actors beyond the communities themselves in numerous developing countries who aim to support, in various ways and across different levels, communities in a CFM context. This heterogeneous category of actors is explored in this dissertation using the term external actors as their common characteristic is that they are external to the communities themselves. There has been very little scholarly work exploring the involvement of external actors in CFM, meaning that understanding of how these situations differ theoretically and empirically from pure community self-governance is limited. The dissertation asks the question: In what ways and with what potential effects do external actors facilitate self-governance in Community Forest Management in India? Complementing the CPR literature, the dissertation also draws on International Development/ civil society scholarship (ID) and the emerging Critical Institutionalism (CI) perspective to create a holistic analytical framework. The results and analysis presented in the empirical chapters differ in terms of the external actors analysed, the scale of analysis and the emphasis placed on particular aspects of external actor involvement in facilitating community self-governance. The main conclusions are that external actors are closely engaged with communities in a CFM context over extended periods of time whilst also influencing the broader policy environment, which shapes CFM at the local level. The approaches they take and the activities they engage in at the local and policy levels greatly shape forest institutions and sustainable livelihoods in a CPR context. As such, a complex, dynamic relationship appears to be created between the external actors and the communities. The emergent picture cannot be easily captured by the concept pure self-governance as studied by CPR scholars. This dissertation proposes the term facilitated self-governance as a discrete mode of governance, theoretically and empirically distinct from pure self-governance. A working definition of facilitated self-governance is ‘a mode of governance in a CPR context in which external actors engage directly, or through influencing CFM related policy, with communities composed of CRP users, with the broad aim of supporting the community’s governance of their CPR and/or improving their livelihoods.’
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