Research frontiers in community forest management

Community forest management (CFM) has been promoted worldwide as a means to conserve forests, recognize community rights, and improve local livelihoods. Here, we synthesize findings across recent CFM studies and identify two thematic and one methodological trend at the forefront of CFM scholarship. The first thematic trend is an examination of community forest enterprises as hybrid business models. The second is the increase of studies examining how REDD+ can contribute to the goals of CFM, and vice versa. The key methodological trend is the use of secondary data sets to determine outcomes of CFM policies at regional and national scales. These three trends add new perspectives to the debate on the effectiveness of CFM as a forest policy and institutional intervention.