Community-Based Natural Resource Governance

Community-based natural resource governance refers to the devolution of decision-making authority and tenure rights over forests, fisheries, rangelands and other common-pool resources to local user groups. By embedding management rules and monitoring within the communities that depend on these ecosystems, governance is shaped through adaptive institutions that reflect social norms, customary rights and ecological feedbacks. Such arrangements aim to balance conservation objectives with livelihood needs, harnessing local knowledge and collective action to maintain ecosystem services, biodiversity and cultural values. Emphasis on polycentric governance further encourages nested institutions and multi-stakeholder collaboration, linking village assemblies or cooperatives with district, national and international agencies. This approach has gained global momentum as a means to foster resilience in social–ecological systems, to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration, and to support sustainable development goals by empowering marginalised groups.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have examined the multifunctional outcomes of community forest governance across diverse tropical regions. Analysis of over 300 forest commons spanning Africa, Asia and Latin America revealed five distinct clusters characterised by differing levels of carbon storage, tree species richness and livelihood benefits. Crucially, the presence of formal community management associations and active local participation in rule-making emerged as consistent predictors of synergies across multiple objectives. Trade-off analysis demonstrated that empowered local institutions can simultaneously enhance above-ground biomass, conserve biodiversity and secure forest-based incomes. These findings underscore the importance of institutional design and the interplay between ecological and social indicators when crafting restoration and conservation interventions in multifunctional forest landscapes.

Community-Based Natural Resource Governance publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in community-based natural resource governance across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Common-pool resource: A resource system from which it is difficult to exclude users and where one user’s extraction reduces availability for others.

Forest commons: Forested areas jointly managed by local communities under recognised collective tenure arrangements.

Conservation basic income (CBI): A regular cash-transfer programme intended to incentivise conservation actions while supporting community livelihoods.

Impact evaluation: A methodological framework that uses counterfactual scenarios to assess the causal effects of interventions on environmental and social outcomes.

References

1. Community forest governance and synergies among carbon, biodiversity and livelihoods. Nature Climate Change (2023).
2. Is conservation basic income a good idea? A scoping study of the views of conservation professionals on cash giving programmes. Biological Conservation (2023).
3. Toward improved impact evaluation of community forest management in Indonesia. Conservation Science and Practice (2020).