Forest communities

The Responsive Forest Governance Initiative (RFGI) is an Africa-wide environmental-governance research and training program focusing on enabling responsive and accountable decentralization to strengthen the representation of forest-based rural people in local-government decision making.

This publication presents a comprehensive analysis of the rights-based agenda in forestry, connecting it with existing work on tenure reform, governance rights and human rights. The attention to rights in forestry differs from 'rights-based approaches' in international development and other natural resource fields in critical ways. Above all, redistribution is a central demand of activists in forestry, but not in other fields.