Forests in common: Learning from diversity of community forest arrangements in Europe
- PDF / 464,632 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 189 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Forests in common: Learning from diversity of community forest arrangements in Europe Anna Lawrence
, Paola Gatto, Nevenka Bogataj, Gun Lidestav
Received: 19 July 2019 / Revised: 9 April 2020 / Accepted: 5 August 2020
Abstract Europe has a wealth of community forest arrangements. This paper aims to transcend the diversity of locally specific terms and forms, to highlight the value of considering them inclusively. Building on methods to make sense of diversity, we use reflexive grounded inquiry in fifteen cases in Italy, Scotland, Slovenia and Sweden. Within four dimensions (forest, community, relationships between them, and relationships with wider society), we identify 43 subdimensions to describe them collectively. Our approach shows how European arrangements contribute to wider discourses of collective natural resource management. Both tradition and innovation in Europe inform options for environmental governance. Arrangements challenge the distinction between ‘communities of place’ and ‘communities of interest’, with implications for social and environmental justice. They exemplify multilevel environmental governance through both vertical and horizontal connections. Emerging from long histories of political and environmental pressures, they have a role in enhancing society’s connection with nature and adaptive capacity. Keywords Forest ownership Grounded inquiry Multilevel governance Property rights Social innovation Sustainability
INTRODUCTION There is a long and rich tradition of communities owning, managing and using forests in Europe (Jeanrenaud 2001; Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01377-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users.
Pema´n and De Moor 2013). Research has illustrated the survival or loss of mediaeval commons (Gatto and Bogataj 2015), effects of socialism and post-socialism (Bogataj and Krcˇ 2014; Premrl et al. 2015), social innovation (AmbroseOji et al. 2015), recent policy programmes (Lawrence and Ambrose-Oji 2015), new groups forming in response to ongoing land reform (Hoffman 2013) and effects on forest management and social equity (Lidestav et al. 2013). However, the overall diversity of European community forest arrangements has featured little in international community forestry literature (Gilmour 2016). Hundreds of scientific papers focus on community forest management in Asia, Africa and North America, many describing community forestry as a state- or donor-imposed agenda, others focusing on indigenous traditions of forest management, others on intermediate, multilayered or innovative arrangements (Ito et al. 2005; Hess 2008; Arts 2014; Cossı´o et al. 2014). While the modern governance language of ‘participation’ and ‘stakeholders’ is often applied to new examples (e.g. McIlveen and Bradshaw 2009), it is challenging to apply these concepts to institutions that have evolved over centuries, and to develop an analysis that includes both ends of this a
Data Loading...
