Distribution of Rights Among Communities
of Forest Users
Defining who
has a right to forest resources is a major concern for all
community forestry programs. To date there has been little analysis
of whether the people who participate in these programs include all
those who use and need forest products to sustain their
livelihoods. For example, is proximity to a forest alone sufficient
reason for a community to claim access to the forest's
benefits?
With the
expansion of the Haryana program in India, for example, in many
cases, the residents of adjoining or even fairly distant villages
started protesting against joint management agreements that had
been negotiated with only one of numerous traditional user
communities. They claimed equal, if not greater, traditional rights
in the same forest area as those residents closer to it, rights
sometimes granted earlier by a different government agency.
Although not recognized by the forest department, these rights are
accepted and honored among village groups and effectively determine
which groups have access to a particular forest tract to meet their
subsistence needs. By overlooking both formal and tacit
arrangements, the department may inadvertently deprive one group of
its traditional access to a local resource by legitimizing
exclusive access to another group. In addition to increasing
inequity among different users, this may also sow the seeds of
intergroup conflict where none existed before.
The notion of
primary, secondary, and tertiary resource users deserves
consideration. Primary users may be defined as those who live close
to an area of forest and use it on a daily basis; secondary users
as those who use the forest on a regular, but not daily, basis as a
major source of products to sustain their livelihoods (for example,
fuelwood sellers); and tertiary users as seasonal users, such as
grazers or collectors of medicinal herbs. The access rights of
primary, secondary, and tertiary users should be negotiated
together to ensure that alienation of rights does not occur.
Distribution of Rights Within
Communities of Forest Users
Complicating
the question of the rights of different communities is the problem
of imbalances in authority and decision-making power within a
community of forest users. Communities may be stratified by gender,
class, and/or caste. Often, those most dependent on forest
resources have the least power of access and the most limited role
in decision making. For example, Indian women are the primary
collectors of nontimber forest products (see box on page 28), but
the decisions taken under community forestry arrangements are often
made by men at public meetings where