The Community Forests of Mexico
The Community Forests of Mexico
Managing for Sustainable Landscapes
Mexico leads the world in community management of forests for the commercial production of timber. Yet this success story is not widely known, even in Mexico, despite the fact that communities around the globe are increasingly involved in managing their own forest resources. To assess the achievements and shortcomings of Mexico's community forest management programs and to offer approaches that can be applied in other parts of the world, this book collects fourteen articles that explore community forest management from historical, policy, economic, ecological, sociological, and political perspectives.
The contributors to this book are established researchers in the field, as well as many of the important actors in Mexico's nongovernmental organization sector. Some articles are case studies of community forest management programs in the states of Michoacán, Oaxaca, Durango, Quintana Roo, and Guerrero. Others provide broader historical and contemporary overviews of various aspects of community forest management. As a whole, this volume clearly establishes that the community forest sector in Mexico is large, diverse, and has achieved unusual maturity in doing what communities in the rest of the world are only beginning to explore: how to balance community income with forest conservation. In this process, Mexican communities are also managing for sustainable landscapes and livelihoods.
This is an important and comprehensive book that is timely, original, and of uniformly high quality. There is relatively little familiarity outside of Mexico with the incredibly rich experience of community forest management there. Certainly no comprehensive review such as this book exists that covers so many aspects of the subject. . . . The book will appeal to scholars from both social and biophysical sciences interested in forest management and in broader conservation and development issues.
David Barton Bray is Professor of Environmental Studies and Director, Institute for Sustainability Science in Latin America and the Caribbean, at Florida International University in Miami.
Leticia Merino-Pérez is a faculty member of the Institute of Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Deborah Barry is a program officer with the Ford Foundation. She founded PRISMA, a Salvadoran NGO specializing in agrarian environmental research.
- Acknowledgments
- Part I: Introduction, History, and Policy
- Chapter 1: Community Managed in the Strong Sense of the Phrase: The Community Forest Enterprises of Mexico (David Barton Bray, Leticia Merino-Pérez, and Deborah Barry)
- Chapter 2: Contested Terrain: Forestry Regimes and Community Responses in Northeastern Michoacán, 1940-2000 (Christopher R. Boyer)
- Chapter 3: Forest and Conservation Policies and Their Impact on Forest Communities in Mexico (Leticia Merino-Pérez and Gerardo Segura-Warnholtz)
- Chapter 4: Challenges for Forest Certification and Community Forestry in Mexico (Patricia Gerez-Fernández and Enrique Alatorre-Guzmán)
- Part II: Social Processes and Community Forestry
- Chapter 5: Indigenous Community Forest Management in the Sierra Juárez, Oaxaca (Francisco Chapela)
- Chapter 6: Empowering Community-Based Forestry in Oaxaca: The Union of Forest Communities and Ejidos of Oaxaca, 1985-1996 (Rodolfo López-Arzola)
- Chapter 7: New Organizational Strategies in Community Forestry in Durango, Mexico (Peter Leigh Taylor)
- Chapter 8: Community Adaptation or Collective Breakdown? The Emergence of "Work Groups" in Two Forestry Ejidos in Quintana Roo, Mexico (Peter R. Wilshusen)
- Part III: Ecology and Land Use Change in Community Forestry
- Chapter 9: Ecological Issues in Community Tropical Forest Management in Quintana Roo, Mexico (Henricus F. M. Vester and María Angélica Navarro-Martínez)
- Chapter 10: Land Use/Cover Change in Community-Based Forest Management Regions and Protected Areas in Mexico (Elvira Durán-Medina, Jean-François Mas, and Alejandro Velázquez)
- Part IV: The Economics of Community Forestry
- Chapter 11: Vertical Integration in the Community Forestry Enterprises of Oaxaca (Camille Antinori)
- Chapter 12: The Managerial Economics of Sustainable Community Forestry in Mexico: A Case Study of El Balcón, Técpan, Guerrero (Juan Manuel Torres-Rojo, Alejandro Guevara-Sanginés, and David Barton Bray)
- Part V: Global Comparisons and Conclusions
- Chapter 13: The Global Significance of Mexican Community Forestry (Dan Klooster and Shrinidhi Ambinakudige)
- Chapter 14: Community Forestry in Mexico: Twenty Lessons Learned and Four Future Pathways (David Barton Bray)
- Appendix: Acronyms Used
- About the Contributors
- Index
