Social contracts and community forestry: how can we design forest policies and tenure arrangements to generate local benefits?

There is widespread debate about the best strategies to provide local benefits in forest management. We evaluate recent policy changes in British Columbia, Canada, focussing on attempts to create local benefits from public forests through a community forestry program and broad policy changes in 2003 that removed obligations of tenure holders to process timber in areas near where timber was harvested. These obligations were intended to retain benefits of milling jobs locally and were considered part of a 'social contract'. We evaluate these policy changes by asking two specific questions. (1) Do community forest tenures provide more local benefits than major industrial tenures? (2) How have the policy changes of 2003 affected the patterns of fibre flow over the period to 2008? We evaluate these questions through qualitative research and a quantitative fibre flow analysis using a large time-series dataset. Community forests as a group performed better than major industrial tenures in delivering local benefits as we defined them. However, large variation among individual community forests is evident, highlighting the disparate strategies used by communities to promote local benefits. Our fibre flow analysis did not reveal major changes following 2003, suggesting that broader fibre flow trends mask more local perturbations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]