Sunday, January 31, 2010

Joint Forest Management

Joint Forest Management is one of the fine example of Collective action where both state forest department and local communities work together for preventing degradation of forests. Villagers agree to assist in the safeguarding of forest resources through protection from fire, grazing, and illegal harvesting in exchange for which they receive non-timber forest products and a share of the revenue from the sale of timber products. The major reason for the success behind this programme was benefits to both the parties i.e. govt. and local people.So collective action can be more successful if all the parties involved in collective action are benefited.

3 comments:

V S Khokhar said...

Sunderlal Bahuguna launched the Chipko Movement and brought about a revolutionary change in the way people looked at the forests and the trees. The people launched this movement after having realized the benefits of forests in their lives and the disastrous effects the large scale felling of trees was causing to them. Thus it shows collective actions are successful if the percieved benefits are greater than the costs or atleast they appear to be so.

ahmed said...

I think the experience of the displaced people over the ages in India has been such a dreaded tale that people now have lost faith in anything considered ,even remotely 'sarkari' and 'babus' are often taken to be the face of the corrupt state and hence loathed .
The most important aspect, then, is the equitable,just and prompt compensation.

Anshuman kumar said...

@ khokhar & Anshul, i want to add the experience of my field work in Uttarakhand.My village was having a huge forest area. It was the blended effort of govt. and people living there to stop it from degradation. so certainly collective action gives fruitful results. It just depends on what the common property and what the collective behavior that the villagers are having.