Peter Cronkleton

Center for International Forestry Research | CIFOR · Sustainable Landscapes and Livelihoods Team

In 2013, policy makers from the Brazilian state of Amapá launched regulatory reforms intended to streamline options to formalize smallholder forest management. This paper reviews that policy reform process and analyses observations from local stakeholders to identify lessons for the promotion of smallholder forestry. In 2014, 2017 and 2021, intervi...

Community forest management (CFM) is promoted as a strategy to reach multiple development outcomes including the sustainable use of forest resources, forest conservation, poverty alleviation, and social equity through the devolution of rights to forest-dependent communities. Developing effective and equitable strategies to promote CFM requires cons...

Monitoring of the ecological and social, including economic aspects of uses of wild species is critical for sustainable use. Progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and the Aichi Biodiversity Targets is assessed using global indicators, however to date, there is not a comprehensive set of global indicators able to monitor statu...

Natural forest regrowth is critical for restoring ecosystem services in degraded landscapes and providing forest resources. Those who control tenure and access rights to these secondary forest areas determine who benefits from economically charged off-farm opportunities such as finance for forest restoration, selling carbon credits, and receiving p...

We are living in a time of crisis on planet Earth. Urgent calls for transformational change are getting louder. Technical solutions have an important role to play in addressing pressing global challenges, but alone they are not enough. After all, who decides what kind of transformation is needed, of what, and for whom? What principles guide those d...

On-farm timber production is an important subsistence and economic activity of smallholder farmers around the world. Farmer investment in wood production and the degree of formality in the sector depends on access to and conditions of the market, the nature of the regulatory frameworks that govern rights to and movement of timber, and access to fin...

From 2016–2019, the West African Forest-Farm Interface (WAFFI) project engaged with smallholder farmers in northern Ghana to explore mechanisms to improve the influence of under-represented peoples, particularly women, in decision-making processes and platforms that affect their access to natural resources. Through a multi-phase process of particip...

REDD+ was conceived as a system of incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. While this could include many different types of interventions to reduce deforestation and degradation, a consensus has emerged that they should safeguard and “do no harm” to the forest-based livelihoods of local people. Many REDD+ projects have...

Community forest management (CFM) has been promoted for decades as a way to merge environmental conservation with economic development and natural resource rights agendas. Yet many of these initiatives have also led to substantial socioeconomic and environmental trade-offs. We present a comprehensive global analysis of environmental, income and nat...

Los pueblos indígenas desempeñan un rol importante en la gestión de los bosques peruanos, pero la magnitud de su participación es poco conocida. Para promover la toma de conciencia y la comprensión de la gestión forestal por parte de los pueblos indígenas se necesita una plataforma que recopile datos claves de diferentes fuentes, articule la inform...

The Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism faces implementation challenges related to tenure security and governance institutions. In response, multiple regional climate mitigation initiatives have emerged. In Peru, indigenous networks have created their own Indigenous Amazonian REDD (RIA), an initiative...

In Peru, as in many developing countries, charcoal is an important source of fuel. We examine the commercial charcoal commodity chain from its production in Ucayali, in the Peruvian Amazon, to its sale in the national market. Using a mixed-methods approach, we look at the actors involved in the commodity chain and their relationships, including the...

In 2015 the Peruvian government launched a new set of regulations associated with the forest law aimed to increase competiveness of the timber sector, ensure the conservation and sustainable production of timber on public and private forestlands, and improve rural livelihoods. Small-scale timber producers have been marginalized in the sector in the...

The field of forest landscape restoration (FLR) is quickly gaining traction now that national commitments to restore degraded lands under the 2011 Bonn Challenge have reached upwards of 160 million ha. While the growing literature on FLR and associated methodologies being proposed emphasizes the importance of including stakeholders in decision maki...

To promote forest landscape restoration (FLR), national governments have embarked on far reaching policy reforms to reclassify lands targeted for restoration, designate legitimate forest stewards and define acceptable land use practices, responsibilities and benefits. Policy reforms intended to influence forest management behavior face complex chal...

Participatory forest management (PFM) and area exclosure (AE) are two major degraded forests and agricultural landscapes rehabilitation mechanisms in Ethiopia. This study examined shared strengths and limitations of PFM and AE. The major strength of PFM is that the process begins by convincing communities to establish access and management norms in...

To promote forest landscape restoration (FLR), national governments have embarked on far reaching policy reforms to reclassify lands targeted for restoration, designate legitimate forest stewards and define acceptable land use practices, responsibilities and benefits. Policy reforms intended to influence forest management behavior face complex chal...

Decades of development history show that rural agricultural policies and government support for specific en vogue crops can seriously alter land rights, land tenure regimes and land use strategies for local people in tropical forests. Today, oil palm is such a crop, and it is an emergent commodity that is proliferating in the Peruvian Amazon. This...

The Brazil nut (the seeds of the rainforest tree Bertholletia excelsa) is the only globally traded seed collected from the wild by forest-based harvesters across the Amazon basin. The large geographic scale of Brazil nut exploitation and the significant contributions to local livelihoods, national economies, and forest-based development over the la...

Conservation and development practitioners increasingly promote community forestry as a way to conserve ecosystem services, consolidate resource rights, and reduce poverty. However, outcomes of community forestry have been mixed, with many initiatives failing to achieve intended objectives. There is a rich literature on community forestry instituti...

A key premise underlying discussion about deforestation in Amazonian Peru is that small-scale or so-called migratory agriculture is the main driver of deforestation. This premise has been expressed in government documents and public outreach events. How the Peruvian government understands drivers of deforestation in the Amazon has profound implicat...

We examined hunters’ perceptions of fauna to see if expert hunters and other hunters perceive wildlife abundance similarly. We used cultural consensus analysis (CCA) to assess the knowledge of 25 hunters in the Bolivian Amazon about the abundance of 38 animals. CCA indicated highly shared beliefs among hunters concerning wildlife abundance (average...

Una premisa clave del debate sobre la deforestación en la Amazonía peruana es que la agricultura de pequeña escala, también conocida como agricultura migratoria, es el impulsor principal de la deforestación. Esta premisa se ha expresado tanto en documentos del Gobierno como en eventos de difusión pública. La manera en que el Gobierno peruano entien...

Conservation and development practitioners increasingly promote community forestry as a way to conserve ecosystem services, consolidate resource rights, and reduce poverty. However, outcomes of community forestry have been mixed; many initiatives failed to achieve intended objectives. There is a rich literature on institutional arrangements of comm...

Indigenous peoples have sometimes sought the formalization of their customary territories to ensure the enforcement of their borders. The process of formalization, however, generates new conflicts. The process of constituting collective territories is intimately related to the constitution of authority, as it involves not only the negotiation of ph...

This article compares and contrasts communal and individual properties to examine the relationship between state efforts to formalize property rights and tenure security. The article draws on a study of four landscape mosaics in the Peruvian and Ecuadoran Amazon, selected to represent dynamic forest frontiers. Though Hernando de Soto and other theo...

Researchers and practitioners have amply discussed the potential of REDD+ to help or harm forest-based communities, but less attention has been paid to its gender dimensions. Safeguard policies are aimed at ensuring that REDD+ does not harm women, but interventions that do not seek to address imbalances at the outset may be doomed to perpetuate the...

Community-managed forests can secure greater sustainability of forests and more equitable livelihood outcomes for stakeholders than centralized forest management. However, there remains an inadequate understanding of whether environmental and socioeconomic outcomes are synergistic or trade-offs, and how they vary in relation to biophysical, institu...

Este documento presenta las bases y justificación de las recomendaciones de modificación del borrador del Reglamento de la Ley Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre (LFFS, Ley Nº 29763). El nuevo Reglamento ofrece la posibilidad de reducir la carga regulatoria de los pequeños agricultores que producen y venden madera de rápido crecimiento en sistemas agrof...

This review summarizes the published literature, as well as any available information provided by NGOs or project proponents, on the practice of community forest management (CFM) in the Peruvian Amazon. It provides an overview of literature related to land‐use and forest management by rural populations in the Peruvian Amazon, placing this informati...

El presente documento realiza una revisión de la literatura publicada, y de toda la información disponible facilitada por ONG o proponentes de proyectos, sobre la práctica del manejo forestal comunitario (MFC) en la Amazonía peruana. Presenta un panorama de la literatura relacionada con el uso de la tierra y el manejo forestal por las poblaciones r...

State devolution has combined with social movement pressures to give communities increasing access and rights to southern forests, making development of effective local participation in sustainable resource management crucial. This paper discusses an experience of participatory research in Central America, which sought to help two grassroots forest...

Superposición espacial en la zonificación de bosques en Madre deDios Implicaciones para la sostenibilidad del recursocastañero Mensajes clave • A pesar de que muchos esfuerzos se han dirigido a mejorar la situación del manejo de la castaña en Madre de Dios, todavía existen vacíos legales y contradicciones que atentan contra el mantenimiento a largo...

At the 2010 Montpellier conference on ‘Taking Stock of Smallholder and Community Forestry: Where do we go from here?’, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners came together to discuss historical trends and future directions for understanding and supporting forest sustainability and local livelihoods in forest-based communities. A consensus ari...

At the 2010 Montpellier conference on 'Taking Stock of Smallholder and Community Forestry: Where do we go from here?', researchers, policy-makers and practitioners came together to discuss historical trends and future directions for understanding and supporting forest sustainability and local livelihoods in forest-based communities. A consensus ari...