Divergent destinies among pine forests in Northern Pakistan: linking ecosystem characteristics with community self-governance and local institutions

SUMMARY

Community forestry is being promoted as a means to maximize benefits of the resource base to local users in rural regions, through the application of self-governance and self-regulatory institutions. It is argued that this bottom-up approach can result in a conserved ecosystem, and provide greater benefits to users than top-down approaches, where governments are often inadequately enforcing rules. The North West Frontier Province of Pakistan is embarking on community forestry promotion in native pine forests (Pinus roxburghii), but in many areas failures of such projects have been realized. In this study we compared ecosystem composition in three sites with similar ecosystem characteristics but different levels of contemporary user group self-regulation. Contrary to a prediction based purely on commons theory, our results show that self-governance by communities can lead to conservation of the resource base, even in areas where there has not been a long history of indigenous community forest management. Thus, common pool resources can be conserved by means other than socialism or privatization as argued by proponents of commons theory. However, we stress that government and non-government support agencies should consider maintaining a presence in community forest areas until communities are sufficiently convinced of the long-term benefits of cooperative management strategies.

Key words:

• Biodiversity
• chir pine
• community forestry
• degradation
• Himalayas
• Pinus roxburghii
• resource management
• rural development