Whilst truly wild woodlands are ‘climax vegetation’ that has achieved a balance between death and renewal, these generally need to be at a scale much bigger than any of our remaining woodlands to thrive independently of humans.

Here in Britain, “the wildwood” has a central place in our culture and imaginations, but the reality is that active management has shaped our woodlands since the ice age, providing supplies of food, fuel and timber, and creating diverse habitats amongst the trees. Unmanaged woodland lacks diversity and can result in poor tree health and increase the spread of tree diseases.

Whilst most of that unmanaged woodland is in private ownership, the future management of our public forest estate also remains uncertain. Attempts in 2010 to sell off the national forest estate were abandoned in the face of a public outcry, but austerity has resulted in many local authority woodland teams being disbanded and the future for the management of the national public forest estate – at least in England – remains unclear.

It is in that gap between the market and the state that we find the commons and, increasingly, a diverse range of community businesses, co-operatives and other forms of social enterprise creating value and livelihoods from its management. So does social and community business have a role in reinvigorating our woods and forests and rebuilding our woodland culture?

In 2012, in the aftermath of the failed forestry sell off and in the wake of the Independent Panel on Forestry’s report, a number of organisations came together to discuss alternative approaches to the management of our woods and forests.

There was already a well established sector of community woodlands and voluntary groups involved in woodland management across the UK. There were also some examples of social enterprises managing significant-sized woodlands, particularly in Scotland where community buyouts meant communities in the Highlands and Islands already had ownership and control over their local woodlands and a focus on sustainable local economic regeneration.

Could these approaches provide new models for managing our woodlands in ways that created livelihoods, improved their quality, and produced useful resources such as woodfuel?

That 2012 meeting led to the establishment of the Woodland Social Enterprise Network and, over time, the development of a proposal for a project to support the development of social enterprise in woodlands. In 2015, funding was secured from Big Lottery to deliver Making Local Woods Work, a pilot programme to provide technical assistance, training and peer networking opportunities for woodland-based social enterprises across the UK.

The programme, which runs until Autumn 2018, is providing support to 50 woodland social enterprises right across the UK, each of which embed woodlands or woodland products into their core activity whether that is the production of woodfuel and timber, or delivering educational or health and well-being activities in a woodland setting. It provides technical advice on woodland management and finance, support in developing business plans, choosing legal structures and strengthening governance, and advice on leases, tenure, and a wide range of other issues. It also provides training, webinars and peer networking opportunities, many of which are available to the wider network of woodlands social enterprises as well as those who are part of the formal support programme.

Austerity has resulted in many local authority woodland teams being disbanded and the future for the management of the national public forest estate – at least in England – remains unclear.

Case studies:

Vert Woods Community Woodland in East Sussex is a 171 acre woodland that is owned and managed for community and wildlife benefit. Much of the woodland is recovering woodland, substantially affected by the Great Storm of 1987 and includes mature tall pines, oak and beech, as well as under-managed chestnut coppice, and unmanaged birch and willow. With support from Making Local Woods Work, Vert Community Woodland has registered as a Community Benefit Society (CBS) and is looking to widen its community membership and issue shares to enable the community to collectively own the woodland.

Elwy Working Woods in North Wales is a co-operative and social enterprise set up in 2010 to create sustainable employment by managing local woodland to produce good quality timber for construction and joinery. North Wales has seen the demise of several small sawmills in recent decades and Elwy Working Woods is looking to create new models for the business that can provide sustainable employment and add value to local natural and renewable resources. They aim to provide a one-stop shop capable of supplying everything from complete house frames to kitchen tables, using locally-grown timber and providing local training, employment and volunteering opportunities.

Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park manage London’s most urban woodlands in a densely populated and rapidly growing borough. The park is located in of one of London’s Magnificent Seven Cemeteries and owned by the local council. The Friends maintain the site under a Service Level Agreement and provide a wide range of public events, short courses and heritage activities as well as managing the woodland. In order to expand their activities, increase their commercial income, and ensure a sustainable long term future for the Cemetery Park, the Friends are being supported by Making Local Woods Work to review their business plan and explore opportunities for more secure tenure on the site with the council.

The forestry and timber processing sector already support around 43,000 jobs in the UK. It directly employs around 14,000 people in more than 3,000 separate enterprises, suggesting that the vast majority of forestry business is undertaken by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Community and social enterprises operate to a triple bottom line, ensuring that the way they manage woodlands is good for people and good for the environment as well as good for the economy. As well as providing social benefits such as health, education and wellbeing through the activities they deliver in woodlands, the very act of managing local land and resources is one that supports longer term community empowerment.

This aspect of community management is recognised and supported by programmes that enable community management, and even ownership, of the public forest estate in Wales and Scotland.

In 2011, Natural Resources Wales launched the Woodlands and You (WaY) scheme, which enables communities and social enterprises to operate long term projects through Management Agreements and Leases. Forest Enterprise Scotland’s Community Asset Transfer Scheme (CATS) provides asset transfer rights for communities who want to take on ownership or leases on Scotland’s National Forest Estate. This builds on the previous Scottish National Forest Land Scheme that gave community organisations the chance to buy or lease National Forest Land where they could provide increased public benefits.

To date, no such scheme exists in England, making it harder for community and social enterprises to secure leases or management agreements. Harder, but not impossible. Neroche Woodlanders are an example of a social enterprise that has secured a 10-year lease from Forestry Commission England to inhabit, manage and harvest wood from 100 acres of woodland near Taunton in Somerset.

Our woodland commons have always provided for basic human needs and securing access to them forms a rich part of our history. This November marks the 800th anniversary of the 1217 Charter of the Forest that restored the rights of free tenants to access and use the Royal Forests that were being enclosed. The Charter protected practices such as ‘pannage’ (knocking acorns from oak trees for pigs) and ‘estover’ (collecting wood). Whilst our expectations of what woodlands can provide for us may have changed over the centuries, the issues that the charter sought to address remain familiar.

Celebrations for the 800th Anniversary range from the call for a new Charter for Trees, Woods and People being led by the Woodland Trust, a public meeting under the Ankerwycke yew at Runnymeade to call for a new Doomsday book of the Commons, and a black tie dinner at Lincoln Cathedral. However you celebrate it, the anniversary provides an opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of our woodlands and the potential for communities to manage them in ways that work for everyone.

You can find out more at Making Local Woods Work and on Twitter @localwoodswork. The Woodland Social Enterprise Facebook page is also open to anyone with an interest in the sustainable  management of woodlands and provides a great place to connect online with what others are doing to make woods work for everyone.

The Making Local Woods Work / Community Woodland Association Conference will be held on 20-21 October 2017 in Westerwood Hotel, Cumbernauld, Scotland. More information.

Mark Walton is the founder and Director of Shared Assets, a think and do tank that supports the management of land for the common good. He currently acts an advisor to Defra, and Charity Bank on issues such as working with civil society, asset transfer, and social investment.

Republished from STIR magazine

Photo by FraserElliot

The post Making Local Woods Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Like most villages in the Abu Road region of Rajasthan, India, Nichlagarh is a predominantly adivasi village. Consisting of about 650 households in five hamlets, the village is spread over an undulating hilly, forested terrain, with streams, water check dams (nadis) and patches of mixed deciduous forests. Most women work hard on their fields or foraging from the forest to meet the needs of their households, while men work on their small tracts of agricultural land or work outside the village or on others’ fields. The women regard the forests as their domain and their culture, and their lives are intricately woven into the weft and warp of their forest commons. It was the adivasi women who drew attention to the region in 2010 when they took the initiative to organize a Dharna, or nonviolent mass sit-in strike, and blocked traffic on the highway. They were demanding recognition of their rights to the forest.

Sharmi Bai, 45, is the dynamic president of the panchayat, or village council, whose leadership in mobilizing the community has twice earned her victory in the local election by large margins. Before the 1960s, the villages enjoyed free access to the forest and its grazing lands, but those lands have become increasingly restricted since the Forest Department took control; and in 1981 with the advent of the Forest Conservation Act, its control by the Forest Department was complete. Today women lament the loss of their autonomy and the decline in the health of the forests. “If they [the Forest Department] had given us [women and adivasi people] community rights earlier, the forest would not have disappeared,” said women of the hamlet located closest to the forest commons, who witness its devastation every day.

For the adivasi, the forest has been the center of their existence since ancient times. It gives them everything – wood, timber, food, rope, shelter, clothing. Its large leaves from deciduous trees such as the saal and the palaash are used to make umbrellas and even footwear. The forest gives bark that provides medicine, gum and oil. It seems as if everything that people need could be either found or grown just by scattering a few seeds. In the higher reaches of the hills, musli and other foods once grew. People recalled that they would harvest a little for their needs and sometimes a little extra for exchange. “The trees and shrubs and grasses and herbs – they nurtured us,” said Sharmi Bai. “We tended to the forest and regulated its use among ourselves, not by principles of management but by processes of sharing.”

“We cut the wood from the trees for our multiple uses,” said Bai, “but we did it mindfully to ensure that there was adequate and more forest wealth was restored. We know how to harvest crops, even museli and kaneri (a valuable small gourd vegetable plant), without harming the shoots or destroying the nodes that would spring into new shoots. We would take care to pick the stocks of plants to ensure that there was enough left to replenish for our next cycle, so we nurtured the forest collectively, not by dividing it among ourselves but by tending to it collectively. Anyone seen to be destructive or greedy would be reprimanded and we would help each other to sustain and collect for our needs.”

Despite their significant roles in managing forest commons, women were not allowed to participate in the traditional spaces where customary rights were determined. Given the patriarchal social structure of these tribes, women are not viewed as rights holders. Yet communities have recognized their roles and rely on them to advocate for rights and meet survival needs.

The Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) ushered in a major set of changes to create legal entitlements to traditional rights for forest dweller communities. The enactment sought to correct the “historical injustices” wrought upon the traditional forest dwellers. But the FD viewed the forest as its fiefdom and sought to govern it using modern principles of forest management, which focused on only a few species and failed to recognize traditional methods of sustaining forests and traditional forest livelihoods.

The FD in its colonial legacy viewed forest dwellers and dependent communities as encroachers. It sought to curtail their rights or evict them from their forests through varied legislative and executive means, often causing serious risk to life and livelihoods. More recently, the FD had on the one hand come down heavily on communities to penalize them for encroachments and “illegal felling,” while itself allowing timber felling and extraction. It also allowed the allotment of forest lands to industries after only cursory community consultations, causing great distress and displacement of tribal communities in several regions.

The Forest Rights Act challenged the FD’s control over the forests by expressly restoring traditional rights of forest dwellers to govern their forests through both individual claims and community rights. However, the FD, flouting the clear intent of the Act to give tribal communities autonomy in governing their forests, continues to resist this law by allowing recognition to only a small portion of the claims filed and challenging claims for community forests under the provisions of the FRA.

The Forest Rights Act and the PESA Act (Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas)² make provisions for communities to claim traditional rights for defining the extent and governance of the commons, validating their traditional systems and practices; these two laws seek to restore the autonomy of tribal communities to determine how their forests should be governed, and restrict the powers of the FD, which has resisted the implementation of these enactments. The recognition of women as key and legitimate actors in the democratic, decentralized forest governance of traditional tribal forums, has strengthened their roles. It has also strengthened the commoning process, enhanced livelihoods, and strengthened the region’s food security and environmental sustainability for future generations.

Dhani Bai of Mataphalli came to the village four decades ago, at a time when everyone was entitled to a stake in the natural resources within the village. Every new bride was aware of the rules, and knew the boundaries of her village. But under the Forest Department regime, said Dhani Bai, “the forest is now off-limits to us and we have to look elsewhere for grasses, herbs and other needs because the boundaries have now been constructed by the Forest Department to prevent us from gaining access to our resources. But we are the ones who tended to the needs of the forest in the first instance!”

Especially between 1980 and 2005, villagers routinely found large amounts of wood being pilfered from the forest, even after reporting such theft. “The powerful contractor lobbies try to get our young boys to steal the wood for their profit,” said Dhani Bai, “but we know what the consequences of such actions will be. They will cause the land to dry and our water to recede.” Gradually, Forest Department management caused changes in how forest resources are managed and how communities relate to each other and to the environment. In the village hamlet of Verafalli, home to sixty-five families, there is little land available for any scattered sowing, and neighboring forests are out of bounds. Forest Department guards and rangers confiscate any tools and penalize anyone found to be grazing their animals in the forests.

In response to the kabja or capture of their traditional forests, women describe the different practices that have evolved to manage forests even within their own village vicinity. One section of Verafalli has continued to manage the forest as a commons, resisting the trend to fence off sections to individual households. Adapting practices from the past, the village has instead negotiated norms for the use and management of about five acres of forest. Women here have resisted attempts to divert these tracts to other uses and attempts by the Forest Department to incorporate this area to their control. While the state has yet to recognize Verafalli’s claim to the lands under the Forest Rights Act, the community under the women’s leadership has managed to ensure free access for cattle grazing and produce-collection for those who have been traditional users, or about seventy households.

“The more that the state delays or neglects the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, especially the claims for community rights,” Sharmi Bai lamented, “the more likely it is that communities will move towards apportioning forest rights to individual families’ households.” Thus in Matafalli, another hamlet of the same village closer to the river, forest lands have been apportioned as separate parcels for each of the hamlet’s sixty-five families. This has resulted in endless wrangling and theft. “Even my own patch where I have planted fruit trees is not free from assault,” Sharmi Bai noted, showing us the area where the commons has now been fenced by individual households.

Of course, these arrangements have changed the social relationships between families as each protects its own patch, denying others access to even paths on their land. This does not bode well for the cohesion of the community and its common interests. Nor does it bode well for the health of the forests, said Sharmi Bai: “If we start thinking about the forests as property then our common, cohesive social processes will get eroded. We will only look to the forest as trees and wood like the contractors and the FD [Forest Department] do, and soon it will all become agricultural land.” This would not be the case if FRA were to be implemented in its true spirit, in her view. “ Water used to be plentiful in this region, but now it is becoming scarce. There are multiple hand pumps in the village, but with the destruction of the forests the other crisis is also not far behind. We must restore our rights and protect our forests. It is our way of life.”

For the adivasi, the forest has been the center of existence since ancient times.

Dhani and other women remember the severe famine in the 1960s when they survived on fruits, herbs and greens from the forests even though they were closed to the community. With no other options, most migrated to a nearby town to earn a wage. The wages allowed the community to survive, but it also allowed an influx of products from the market and traders eager to buy the local produce. As families grew and forests became depleted, each household now seeks to have at least one child in government service and others in jobs to provide for household needs. Hopes of the FRA being implemented effectively notwithstanding, their changed relationships with the forest have reduced their self-provisioning, on the one hand, and their dependency on wages have made them more dependent on markets. The traditional melas (local fairs) at the Khetia Bapasi – a local deity whose place of worship in the forest brought community men together to decide on community management affairs – are now reduced to a ritual. The jurisdiction of such gatherings is limited to discussions about the village and community lands because the Forest Department is now the dominant authority for managing forests and their use.

While basic entitlements to the forests remain unaddressed, notwithstanding the mandate of the Forest Rights Act, the new District Commissioner who oversees the Abu Road region has proposed new schemes to strengthen livelihoods in the region, and to promote water harvesting and watershed management. Forest commoners are understandably skeptical. They have seen the ineffective, politically motivated behaviors of the state – and appreciate and struggle to retain the effective and sustainable processes of their own commoning. The women of the forest commons have seen how their own knowledge, social collaboration, community ethic and leadership are likely to be a better means for protection of the forest commons over time than narrow scientific expertise and politically motivated policies that cater to the economic moguls. The women see strength in the provisions of the FRA, which recognizes a process of decentralized self-governance based on respect for their traditional rights: a process that will help them restore depleted commons and maintain those that exist through their traditional practices.

Soma KP (India) is a researcher, policy analyst and support person to community based institution-building initiatives, with more than three decades of experience in the area of gender, development and natural resource based livelihoods.

Richa Audichya (India) is director of Jan Chetna Sansthan, an NGO that works with a women-centered approach to adivasi people’s rights and leadership development – the focus of her work for more than twenty years.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Daniel Mennerich

The post Patterns of Commoning: Our Ways of Knowing: Women Protect Common Forest Rights in Rajasthan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The institution of obștea was not founded at a precise moment or as a contractual organization. Legend tells us that in the sixteenth century Stephen the Great endowed the founders of seven villages for their military merits with communal ownership of the Vrancea Mountains.

Villages of the region jointly possessed the mountains for generations (only interrupted by state ownership during the communist regime), a unique circumstance in Romania and a rarity in Europe. Initially, the whole region owned the entire mountain area (Stahl 1958) in devalmașie. The first division of the land among villages occurred in 1755, followed by another five divisions until the last one in 1840. The divisions were made to meet the pasturing needs of each village and to resolve a political conflict.² By the end of the nineteenth century, villagers’ access to their forests became more and more restricted as exploitation technologies improved and wood became a valuable commodity associated with money, and social status. During this period, several powerful foreign forestry companies, especially from Austria and Italy, struck deals with local elites for leasing and exploiting large areas of forest. In several villages, with the money yield, the old elites worked for the best of the community, building schools, village halls and communal baths. In others, the locals’ collective memory remembers elites who deceived people to sell their use rights, often for a pack of cigarettes. The foreign companies ended their activity in Vrancea by the beginning of the First World War, after committing massive deforestation.

The Romanian state introduced its first forestry statute, The Forestry Code, in 1910, giving obștea formal legal recognition. The law required villagers to obtain vouchers from a local committee (without payment) to harvest lumber, as well as certificates to transport it. These regulations were mostly seen as unnecessary formalities and were not strictly followed at the time. Instead, customary norms continued to serve as effective regulation.

The obștea might have slowly transformed from a socially embedded institution into a modern organizational form except that, in 1948, the Communist Party came to power and the state seized all communal forest property. In the 1950s there were a number of serious fights in Vrancea between villagers belonging to the Anticommunist Resistance Movement, and communist authorities. Several people were killed, and some were imprisoned. These events, along with an outmigration of educated people from rural areas, led to a loss of capable local elites. Many obștea traditions were lost or receded.

Locals’ experiences during the communist period varied a great deal from village to village, and even within the same village. Some people worked as wage earners within state structures. Others stole wood from their former common property with the tacit acceptance of local authorities. A black market for wood arose alongside the legitimate market, facilitated by bribes paid to party officials. I found in my study of forest usage during the communist period that “having” and “owning” were not very important. More important was access and use, which were facilitated in many ways, both legal and illegal, usually involving state officials and corrupt practices.

Immediately after the fall of communism, restitution politics gave way to new property relations (Hann 1998) and regulation and governance entailed a lot of legal fuzziness (Verdery 1999).

Collective property rights were re-established only in 2000. Meanwhile, local businesses involved with timber extraction flourished. These new businesses did not contribute to local economic development; they offered mostly black market, and low-wage jobs, but they played an influential role in the evolution of obștea institutions because many of them, in flagrant conflicts-of-interest, also served as decision makers.

Nowadays, twenty nine obștea institutions continue to function in Vrancea, managing around 65,000 hectares of forest. Each village owns between 1,500 and 14,000 hectares for a population that may range from 800 to 5,000. The restoration process stipulated that the obștea institutions should follow the model of the old organizational structures and that each obștea has the right to modify their statutory norms, according to local situations, with the agreement of the village assembly.

Men and women have equal property rights, although men participate more in assemblies and do more of the forestry work. The guiding principles of managing forestland in the Vrancea Mountains were (and still are) indivisibility, inalienability and equal sharing. A fundamental characteristic is the equal participation of every individual. But the individual does not hold any measurable right or own a precise plot; the only entitlement is the “right to be a member.” Membership includes the right to vote in the village assembly and to receive an annual quota of wood, which changes according to assembly-based decisions about individual shares. An executive committee, ruled by a president, together with the village assembly, manages each common forest. Villagers elect the committee and the president by a secret democratic vote. The committee handles all administrative operations, including organizing the village assemblies, auctions for selling timber, and distributing annual shares of wood to commoners. The participatory framework is excellent in principle, but in practice there are problems with poor attendance at assemblies, fears about the integrity of vote-counting, conflicts of interest, and a limited pool of capable councilors.

Today, an average of 20 percent of obștea-managed wood goes toward household consumption and the rest (usually in the form of monetary profit) towards improvement of local infrastructure. Locals receive as their share a quantity of one to three cubic meters of firewood per year, per family, and the same quantity of timber, with the right to sell it locally, and not beyond the borders of the obștea. The estimated value of the wood in 2006 for a household of two adults was about 80 euros per year, or about 5 percent of the average annual household income of 1,500 euros in the villages studied.

The legend of the commons’ origins stands as a source of legitimacy for present-day property arrangements. This “once upon a time story” is widely remembered and frequently repeated, with the forest perceived as a “legacy from Stephen the Great.” It amounts to a kind of emotional capital that villagers in the Vrancea Mountains draw upon to reassert their collective local identity and history. The symbolic and affective dimension of property, as managed by obștea, is thus reinforced. Most locals cannot conceive the idea of dividing up their forests because it would violate “the old way.” Some people see the rights to use the mountains as a compensation for the vrânceni (as people there are called) for not having access to the prosperous, arable land of the plains. Collective property is seen as a simple historical fact – a given. Even though the quality and quantity of the allotted forest land varies from one village to the next, the initial act appears as indubitable: “This is the way Stephen gave it to us!”

Not surprisingly, feelings, perceptions and meaning matter a great deal in the participation of members and in the management of obștea – and these emotions are dynamic and evolving over time and different circumstances. The relationship between these locals and their forest is more complicated than the familiar “peasant attachment” to the land because what they own essentially involves a diffuse material resource and a shared experience: a use-right in the commons. Yet, from the survey I conducted in 2005-2006,³ 42.2 percent say that feel “a lot” like proprietors of the commons. Another 32.7 percent consider themselves proprietors “to some extent” and 24.1 percent “not at all.” Memories, lived and repeated to others, enhance people’s emotional attachment to the commons. Older locals seem to have a fonder regard for their communal forests than the younger generation, and are more supportive of the current organizational practices.

I found in my extensive fieldwork with ten communities in the region⁴ that people spoke of the forest as property in contradictory terms. The meaning of property is locally expressed in two different registers – property as an affective symbol of inheritance and identity, and property as a material, functional resource for use. They use a rhetoric of community pride in owning and managing historic lands using established practices and traditions, as well as a rhetoric of deprivation, as local or national elites illicitly seize most of the forests’ benefits. Feelings of deprivation and injustice arise when ob?tea is perceived through the lens of its ruling structure, as a group of “corrupt opportunists.” Eighty-nine percent of respondents in my survey perceive that ob?tea, understood as its managing committee, does nothing or too little for the communities.

In the post-communist era, there has been a resurgence of pride and memory of the pre-communist-era ob?tea. Yet, there are also struggles to deal with corrupt practices, conflicts over the fair distribution of wood and profits, and poor local leadership. Part of the problem is that the legal framework of commons is not clear or detailed on many matters. Another problem is that there are no local mechanisms to resolve conflicts in low-cost ways. Both customary and state laws appear to be ineffective when corruption is too pervasive or when conflicts escalate. Ambiguous circumstances can easily result in an “adhocracy” that allows self-interested opportunists to exploit the collective good.

Yet despite these challenges, I have found in my studies of Vrâncean villages that there is a remarkably strong support for ob?tea as an institution of collective identity and purpose. Managing the forest is not all about calculations, performance, material value and revenues. It is also about affective relationships and symbolic meaning as reflected in collective memory, tradition and identity. These affective dimensions keep people interested in and involved in the processes related to their forest property even if the external forces of the state, market and local officials may work in other directions.

References

Hann, Chris. 1998. “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Property.” In C.M. Hann, editor, Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stahl, H. Henri. 1958. Contributii la studiul satelor devalmase romanesti [Contributions in Studying Romanian Joint Property Villages]. Bucuresti. Editura Academiei

———. 1980. Traditional Romanian Village Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Prss.

Vasile, Monica. 2006. “Ob?tea today in the Vrancea Mountains, Romania. Self Governing Institutions of Forest Commons.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 4(3):111-130.

———. 2007. “Sense of Property, Deprivation and Memory in the Case of Ob?tea Vrânceana.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 5(2):114-129.

———. 2008. “Nature Conservation, Conflict and Discourses around Forest Management: Communities and Protected Areas from Meridional Carpathians.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 6(3-4):87-100.

Vasile, Monica and Liviu Mantescu. 2009. “Property reforms in rural Romania and community-based forests.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 7(2):95-113

Verdery, Katherine. 1999. “Fuzzy property: rights, power, and identity in Transylvania’s decollectivization.” pp. 53-81. In M. Burawoy and K. Verdery, editors. Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Monica Vasile (Romania) is currently visiting fellow at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she researches issues of environmental and economic anthropology. She was previously a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale).

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Paul.White

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Role of Memory and Identity in the Forest Commons of Romania appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the 1990s, many communities in central Oregon were torn asunder by the “War of the Woods.” Environmentalists had brought lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service for violating its own governing statutes. For decades, timber companies had been allowed to clear-cut public forests, re-seed with tree monocultures, and build ecologically harmful roads on mountain landscapes.

Environmentalists won their lawsuit in 1991 when a federal judge issued an injunction that in effect shut down timber operations in the Pacific Northwest of the US. While the endangered northern spotted owl was the focus of much of the debate, the health of the entire ecosystem was at risk, including the Pacific salmon, which swim upstream to spawn.

There is often no substitute for litigation and government mandates, and the 1991 litigation was clearly needed.  But what is really interesting is the aftermath:  Rather than just designating the forest as a wilderness preserve off-limits to everyone, the Forest Service instigated a remarkable experiment in collaborative governance. From “Seeing the Forest”

Instead of relying on the standard regime of bureaucratic process driven by congressional politics, industry lobbying and divisive public posturing, the various stakeholders in the region formed a “watershed council” to manage the Siuslaw National Forest. Twenty years later, this process of open commoning has produced a significant restoration of the forest ecosystems, implicitly indicting the previous forest management regime driven by politics and the formal legal system.

This story is told in a wonderful thirty-minute film documentary, “Seeing the Forest,” produced by writer and filmmaker Alan Honick, with support from Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.  Honick writes how the public lands in Oregon contained most of the remaining old growth forests outside of protected parks:

These were complex and ancient ecosystems, particularly on the west side of the Cascades, where the moisture from Pacific storms gave rise to rich and diverse temperate rainforests. Hundreds of species of animals and plants depended on this habitat to survive.

For 40 years, these forests were logged with the same industrial methods practiced on private land. Vast swaths were clearcut, then densely replanted with monocultures of the fastest growing trees. When they reached sufficient size, they were scheduled to be clearcut and replanted again, in an ongoing cycle considered sustainable by those who employed it.

The aftermath of the 1991 litigation could have been simmering hostility and litigation, which would likely flare up again.  It was based on the old, familiar narrative of “jobs vs. the environment,” a debate that government was supposed to mediate and resolve.

In Oregon, however, it was decided to develop a “Northwest Forest Plan” that inaugurated a new space and shared narrative.  The Siuslaw Watershed Council invited anyone with an interest in the forest to attend its open, roundtable meetings, to discuss how to manage the forest and resolve or mitigate the competing interests of timber companies, environmentalists, recreational fishers, local communities, hikers, and others.  Outcomes were based on consensus agreement.

One environmentalist confessed that he had never wanted to sit down at the same table with a timber industry representative.  The process of sitting and talking as a group was an important behavioral experience for all sides, however.  It was a process for overcoming mutual skepticism, building trust, putting aside past differences, and taking risks on new ideas. The group does not have binding decisionmaking power, but as a Forest Service representative explained, it has “all but legal” decisionmaking power for the Siuslaw Forest, including how funds will be spent.

The process has focused on a shared goal – the restoration of salmon in the streams and rivers.  While there remain differences among participants, everyone is oriented to finding workable solutions rather than in “winning” through a pitched political or legal system.

One advantage to this process has been using informal agreement to bypass bureaucratic and legal limitation for doing things.  The life-cycle of the salmon spans an entire watershed, from the headwaters of the streams to the ocean – a geographic expanse that goes well beyond the Forest Service lands to include many private lands and community lands.  The watershed council helped surmount some of these jurisdictional issues and allow people to develop more flexible, far-ranging plans than a bureaucratically driven process would allow.  The outcomes had a built-in consensus and legitimacy, which cannot often be said about regulatory processes, where legal strong-arming, big money and cultural polarization often prevail.

The watershed council was able to initiate all sorts of solutions that would probably have eluded the Forest Service acting as a typical bureaucracy.  The council has overseen the thinning of forests in selective, ecologically responsible ways while minimizing road use and decommissioning old logging roads.  It has restored the ecological function of streams and watersheds, including the creation of culverts that mimic streambeds so that salmon could move upstream.  Instead of pulling dead trees out of the stream, they are now left intact because the fish need such habitat.  And so on.

When a major storm hit the forest in 2012, its impact on the streams and roads was minimal – indeed, far less than the impact of a devastating 1996 storm.  Of course, telling this story of effective forest management is harder because there are no apocalyptic photos of destruction to qualify as “news.”

Honick’s understated, well-made film makes a powerful point about the potential of open collaboration.  It can successfully manage even something as large and biophysical as a forest.  Even the market individualists of American culture can achieve a fundamental transformation through commoning.

Originally published at bollier.org

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