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 Working Paper series will publish the RFGI case studies as well as other comparative studies of decentralized natural resources governance in Africa and elsewhere that focus on the intersection between local democracy and natural resource management schemes.

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.