Internalizing Community in Forest Conservation: A Developing Country Perspective

Jugaratan Barman
Rabindra N. Bhattacharya


DOI: 10.2190/ES.31.3.c

Abstract

Forest authorities have been finding it increasingly difficult to protect forests by traditional legal and punitive measures. Many ideas and concepts have emerged over the years such as Forest Protection Committees (FPC), Eco-development Projects, and Joint Forest Management, to address the problem of appropriate management. The basic philosophy behind these concepts is to involve stakeholders in the conservation and management of forests and to give them alternative sources of earnings. This article is an attempt to assess theoretically the justification of stakeholders' participation in the management of forests and empirically to estimate some of the economic and ecological losses when forest authorities fail to involve stakeholders in the process of forest conservation.

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