Fourteen years of monitoring community-managed forests: learning from IFRI's experience

TLDR

Community‑managed forests are a large but poorly understood component of global forests, and the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) network, established in 1992, has monitored over 350 communities and 9,000 plots for more than a decade, providing a unique, large‑scale, interdisciplinary data set. The study identifies lessons for strengthening IFRI’s impact, including agreeing on sustainability metrics, building comparative analysis capacity, ensuring the database serves diverse users, and expanding membership and outreach. These features have enabled IFRI to influence new knowledge, inform policy, support local communities, and build capacity.

Abstract

Although community managed forests constitute a significant proportion of the worlds’ forests, there is little information about their condition or how they are managed. The International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) network is a research programme established in 1992 to collect interdisciplinary information about forest sustainability and governance. IFRI is unique in terms of the large number of small-scale sites monitored (more than 350 communities and 9000 forest plots) for more than a decade, under the guidance of strong central leadership, a well defined research framework, relative autonomy of network members, and a strong inward focus. These features have enabled IFRI to have particular impacts on new knowledge, policy and local communities, and capacity building. Lessons about how to further strengthen, extend and sustain these impacts include developing more robust agreement about measures of forest sustainability, building network members’ capacities to conduct comparative analysis, ensuring the database meets the needs of multiple users and expanding the membership and outreach of the network.