Socio-economic impacts of community forest management in rural India

This work provides an economic and institutional analysis of Joint Forest Management (JFM) as applied in Andhra Pradesh, India. JFM is a natural resource management paradigm that actively involves local stakeholders in the protection and management of local forest resources. In essence, JFM is an institutional framework in which state forest departments work in partnership with local communities to restore degraded forests to a productive and sustainable capacity. Concomitant goals of this program are to increase the incomes of rural participants, and provide an equitable distribution of program benefits throughout local communities. In 1992, Andhra Pradesh enacted legislative orders adopting JFM; these orders were subsequently revised in 2002 to authorize Community Forest Management (CFM), a more devolved version that further involves local communities in the decision-making process of forest management.; Primary data collected from three regions of Andhra Pradesh are used to analyze community-level impacts that this forest management program has on indicators of economic well-being, inequality, and poverty. Results suggest there is an appreciable opportunity cost of adopting the program when all 58 of the sampled villages are analyzed. When restricting the analytical focus to more forest-dependent villages, results indicate the JFM/CFM program has a beneficial impact on economic well-being. This implies the program is successful in achieving one of its objectives: increasing economic benefits for the forest-dependent poor.; The CFM institutions of Andhra Pradesh are evaluated using design principles that Ostrom identified as key institutions common to successful, long enduring common-pool resource management regimes. Taken as a group, all of the design principles are found to exist in the state legislative orders and at the community-level (to varying degrees). However, some of the CFM institutions defined by the state only reflect these design principles in general terms, while the institutions implemented by communities are often incomplete or otherwise deficient.; Policy implications and recommendations drawn from this study are directly applicable to the CFM program of Andhra Pradesh. This study also provides useful information to those interested in the performance of CFM in Andhra Pradesh, or others interested in the general application and performance of JFM in India.