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Community Forestry Partnership Coordinators. Their
task was to initiate, coordinate and manage partner-
ships as one staff member in each cantonment would
never be able to do everything that was necessary.
A beginning had been made in the 1990s with the
coming together of various NGO groups who had
started working with communities in mostly degraded
areas: The Menonite Central Committee established
the first community forest in Takeo province, planting
Acacia manguim
on barren land. In Pursat and Kampong
Chhnang provinces communities were organised by
the South Asia Development Program, and Concern
Worldwide supported a range of community-based
programmes where villagers developed management
plans detailing silvicultural activities. In Kampong
Thom, too, the villagers of Tboung Teuk banded
together to begin planting trees and protecting the
forest once the company was evicted.
Creating a legal framework for community forestry
From these humble beginnings, a national working
group of committed individuals from civil society, the
Forestry Administration and donors got together to
learn from pilot experiences on the ground, and inter-
nationally, to formulate a policy and legal framework
for a national community forestry programme. The
partnership was formed gradually through interactions
enabled by a variety of more or less informal and inter-
linked networks. Various provincial level community
forestry and natural resource management networks,
as well as broader environmental, religious and indig-
enous people’s networks added to the mix. From all
of these emerged a group who realized that partner-
ship rather than conflict would more effectively lead
to change. Most of them came together through the
Community Forestry Working Group that was formed
under the Sustainable Management of Resources in
the Lower Mekong Basin Project in 1998 to assist the
the turn of the century, the country reviewed its development poli-
cies and drafted a National Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. Vital
for continued international support, this strategy depended on the
contribution of all sectors towards the national goal of poverty
reduction, including forests. In 2003, the country committed to
achieving 60 per cent forest cover by 2015 in order to meet its own
Millennium Development Goal targets.
Building partnerships for success
“When I arrived in Cambodia as Chief Technical Advisor to the
Capacity-building for Sustainable Forest and Land Management
Project at the beginning of April 2007, I was sceptical that commu-
nity forestry would advance very far or fast in Cambodia,” says
James Bampton, Program Coordinator, RECOFTC – The Center
for People and Forests. “When I left in July 2009, I held a very
different view: 124 potential community forestry areas had been
approved by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
in six of Cambodia’s 24 provinces, covering a little over 126,900
hectares.” Today, in partnership with the Forestry Administration,
international development agencies, communities and NGOs,
RECOFTC has helped put some 237,781 hectares of forest into
the hands of more than 60,000 families from 450 villages. The
organization has directly supported more than half the country’s
community forestry sites and those with legal agreements. In
Kampong Thom alone, RECOFTC has enabled 120 villages to go
through the legalization process between 2008 and 2010. So how
did this impressive change come about?
Faced with the huge task of stewarding some 300 community
forestry sites under the project through the complex legal recog-
nition process with very few resources and poor Government
capacity at all levels, it quickly became obvious that only a
strong partnership of all major stakeholders – grass-roots NGOs,
community leaders, administration officials and international
organizations – could promote the sustainable development of
community forestry in Cambodia. It was a mission that was to
consume the project staff from then on. All staff had ‘partner-
ship’ included in their formal job titles. Nationally, and in each
of its five target cantonments, the project recruited and deployed
“Once we make the Community Forest
Management Plan, we can get more benefits from
the forests. We will start doing silviculture. We’ll
clear out some of the small plants and trees to get
the bigger trees to grow. We’ll also benefit from
the small trees. We’re already able to gather more
products for traditional medicine and we have a
plan to protect the forest. We can use trees for
building houses, too. I’ve used skills I learned in
the RECOFTC courses doing forest inventory,
recording tree and plant species and developing
records of the forest.”
Ms Sao Saveun,
Community Forest Management Committee
Image and interview: Alison Rohrs, RECOFTC