Coming paper on ETFRN 57 with the abstract below.

Enabling conditions for community forest enterprise (CFE) development in Vietnam: theory, practice and implication for sustainable local forest governance

Dung Tri Ngo, Ariel Pinchot, and Dean Current

Community forest management (CFM) has been proved as an effective approach for sustainable local forest management in the world. By transferring ownership and decision making over forest resources to local communities, this approach was expected to help effectively conserve forest and secure local livelihood at local level. While forest conservation was emphasized in most CFE programs, improving local livelihood remains challenging due to its complex linkage among components of socio-ecological systems. In search of supporting local livelihood improvement, the community forest enterprise (CFE) has been introduced as “an opportunity to strengthen livelihoods of forest dependent people, who disproportionately live in poverty, while conserving the forest ecosystems” (Donovan et al. 2010). This research aims at constructing enabling conditions for a successful CFE from literature and testing those conditions for CFE development in a central province of Vietnam. By using group discussion in three villages operating under CFM scheme, the research showed that most of seven conditions were met at different extent. Among advantages were strong supportive policy and legislative framework, community interest and participation. Challenges remain in accessibility to commercial forest products, market access, and business skills. We recommend that government policies need to improve in providing local rights over commercial forest products and supporting local system through recent initiatives of payment for forest environmental system (PFES) and reduce emission from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).