British Columbia's Community Forest Pilot Projects: Can a Localized Trend Survive in an Increasingly Globalized Forest Sector?

This research examines the Community Forest Pilot Project (CFPP) implemented in British Columbia in 1998. Under this program, the government has allocated forest land and managerial autonomy to ten communities. For many, the CFPP represents a chance for forest-dependent communities to influence their future in a way that conventional forestry has never enabled. Expectations of the project are high. However, as with much of the academic literature on community forestry, which tends to focus almost exclusively on the necessary internal or community level conditions for achieving 'success', this government initiative has not adequately considered the external pressures within the increasingly globalized forest industry that may limit the success of individual community forestry initiatives. Therefore, the research considers if and how British Columbia's CFPP, as a localized trend, will survive in an increasingly globalized forest sector. This question is addressed in two stages. First, a conceptual model of the key factors affecting the viability of community forestry is developed. The model draws upon multiple bodies of scholarship that reflect the multiple scales in which community forests exist. The rationale for this derives from the simple but underappreciated fact that community forest initiatives are influenced and can be constrained by factors beyond the community. In the context of British Columbia, some of these supra-community factors include an onerous provincial forest tenure system, shifting provincial forest policy, increasing Aboriginal engagement in land claims, demands from environmental movements, increasing firm concentration in the forest sector, highly variable international commodity markets, and punitive international trade actions. Second, the model is 'tested' and refined based on the observed initial experiences of British Columbia's ten community forestry pilots. In short, the evidence suggests that the CFPs must complete a series of successive stages in order to ultimately achieve 'success': 1) secure a forest land base; 2) draw on community attributes; 3) comply with the regulatory system; and 4) secure markets and exist within a complex global environment. These steps are not insignificant, which may explain the highly variable progress of the ten CFPs over first five years of the project.