Indigenous exploitation and management of tropical forest resources: an evolutionary continuum in forest-people interactions

Since the early 1980s several new approaches towards forest management, which include active participation of local communities, have been tried out in many tropical regions. As a result of these efforts recognition has increased about the various ways in which many local communities are already actively managing their forest resources. The planning of development interventions to stimulate more efficient community involvement in forest management can often be based on such indigenous forest management systems. This paper aims to improve the understanding about the diversity and dynamics of indigenous forest management. The analysis consists of three parts. First an overview of the various types of indigenous forest management and their dynamics is presented. Subsequently, the basic principles of forest management are discussed. Forest management is characterized as involving a set of both technical activities and social arrangements for the protection and utilization of forest resources and the distribution of forest products. Three major categories of forest management practices are identified, e.g. controlled utilization of forest products, protection and maintenance of forest stands, and purposeful regeneration. The practices in the first category are both socially and biologically oriented, whereas the activities of the last two categories are biologically oriented. These principles are then used to develop a classification model of the various evolutionary phases in forest management. Along the lines of a similar model developed for exploitation of agricultural crops, various stages of forest management are distinguished along a gradient of increasing input of human energy per unit of exploited forest. This gradient represents a continuum of forest-people interactions; it illustrates how the various manifestations of indigenous forest management may be arranged along a nature-culture continuum.