Equitable company-community partnerships: are partnerships between logging companies and communities engaged in community forestry equitable
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2023-11-03
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en
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Community forestry seeks to uplift local communities while conserving forests and addressing issues of poverty, climate change, and sustainability. This study, conducted for NGO Tropenbos International, explores the fairness and equity of company-community partnerships in the context of logging activities within community forestry. Focusing on Liberia, Cameroon, Bolivia, and Mexico, the research adopts an equity framework to evaluate distributive, procedural, and contextual dimensions in these partnerships.
The results reveal that communities often enter exploitative relationships with logging companies, receiving inadequate timber profits, with elite capture exacerbating the inequity. The inequitable partnership starts during the negotiation process, as communities, lacking commercial logging skills, depend on companies for financial capital. Factors contributing to inequity include limited NGO/CSO support, exclusive interactions between logging companies and community elites, and insufficient government support.
Economic and political factors significantly impact partnership negotiations, with government interests in logging companies hindering supportive regulations. Recommendations to enhance equity involve skill development, early-stage external support, CSO and NGO involvement, impartial third-party interventions, governmental support, simplified regulations, enforcement, cost-benefit analysis for timber pricing, and exploring bidding mechanisms. Addressing these aspects can contribute to more equitable community-company partnerships in community forestry, fostering sustainability and fair revenue sharing while conserving biodiversity.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen