Analyzing community-based forestry: Local, political and agrarian perspectives

This article serves as a substantive introduction to the special issue on community-based forestry. It situates the articles contained in this issue in relation to existing research on the social relationships and practices constituting forestry on the ground. Three perspectives on local forest relations, two well established and one emergent, are identified. The local perspective accords analytical priority to micro-level processes and emphasizes local factors as the primary influences on local forest relations. The political perspective emphasizes the contested nature of property in forest, linking local contestations to the effects of larger political forces, in particular states. The third, emergent perspective is agrarian, situating local forest relations at the intersection of local-level processes and larger economic and political forces. This article reviews examples of research employing these perspectives, discusses the papers in this volume with an eye on their relations with the agrarian perspective, and links the agrarian perspective to current concerns in forest policy.