Introduction - Afforestation, Reforestation and Forest Restoration in Arid and Semi-arid Tropics - page 10

in protecting forests with the millions of poor people competing for forest produce.
The policing paradigm might have been appropriate when only an occasional forest
offender was to be dealt with, and the people, in general, did not need to indulge in
breaking forest laws. With rise in population and dwindling of resources, it was a
question of survival for the local people; the police metaphor had to become outdated
and ineffective in the face of overwhelming pressure on forest resources. The reali-
sation that the need is to build enduring partnerships with the local people rather than
to enter into conflict with them came somewhat later, though it is now implemented
by most forest services.
Involvement of communities and user groups in execution of afforestation and
reforestation programmes is necessary to evolve local ownership of the resources
and to ensure sustainable use. Involvement of local people should not be limited to
mere consultative planning. Total involvement is ensured only when the communities
are asked to execute the programme themselves and contribute some part of the cost
of such works, perhaps in terms of free labour. Creating stakes in, and ownership
of, the programme resources are necessary prerequisites of success. The notions of
forests being state property, held over centuries, have made forests the objects of
exploitation rather than of prudent use.
Collaborative working between the forest services and the communities requires
that the communities be organised into institutions for enabling group action, wher-
ever such institutions do not already exist. Institution building is in itself a complex
process and has to be carried out by trial and error, although success is not difficult if
sincere and honest efforts are made. For too long, the issues of bureaucratic reform
and institution building for empowerment of the local communities have deliber-
ately been condemned to the backwaters by selfish interests of the kleptocratic nexus
between the politicians and the bureaucrats in developing countries. Any meaning-
ful progress in effective and productive natural resource governance can only be
achieved by breaking this barrier.

1.8 Constraints in Afforestation and Reforestation

Like the classic factors of any other enterprise, the constraints in afforestation and
reforestation relate to land, labour, capital, technical know-how and entrepreneurial
capacity. Land carries with itself many intricate problems, relating to both its phys-
ical condition and its ownership and use. Vast stretches of wastelands may prompt
one to think that one could start working from an end and neatly progress towards
the other, thus afforesting the entire landmass. But hidden problems crop up at every
step: people can assert customary or self-assumed rights supported by local political
workers, they can invoke their right of way so that every stretch of planned fencing
may be questioned, and the land may have been used as a grazing or herding ground
for a long time, so that any programme of reforestation is seen to violate these rights.
None of these problems can be wished away, and there hardly is a piece of land in the
arid and semiarid tropics where such problems of human and animal pressures do not