 Hello, everyone. We'll get started in just a minute while we wait for folks to join. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the final webinar in the Yale Forest Forum Spring Series, The Promise and Practice of Community-Based Forestry. I'm Ben Walter and I'm the program coordinator for the Forest School at the Yale School of the Environments. Today's webinar is organized by the Yale Forest Forum. YFF is the special events branch of the Forest School. The series has been hosted by the Forest Dialogue and the Urban Resources Initiative. A big thank you to them, as well as to all of you who have attended these webinars week after week. We hope you've enjoyed them. If you missed any of the webinars, you can find the recordings on our website, which I'll post on the chat in a few minutes. Community-based forestry can create pathways for local people to have decision-making control of forest management. It aims to equitably empower all local stakeholders through an inclusive approach to support local communities to secure their land and resource rights, stop deforestation, find alternative livelihoods, and foster gender equity. And I will turn it over to Colleen Murphy Dunning to introduce our speaker. Thank you, Ben, and welcome, everyone. I'm Colleen Murphy Dunning, and I'm the director of the Urban Resources Initiative. And it is my pleasure to introduce our final speaker of our series, Duncan McQueen. Duncan serves as the principal researcher and leader of the Natural Resource Group at the International Institute for Environmental and Development. He has experienced enforced research and a development practitioner, has worked on collaborative programs across more than 30 countries around the globe, including the design and implementation of programs to sustain locally controlled forest business, as well as addressing forest climate strategies, forest governance, forest development ethics, and more. You can read his full bio sketch on a website that Ben Walter is now posting in the chat. So if you want to read more details about his background and expertise, please find it in the chat. And I will now pass to Duncan. Thank you so much, Duncan. Thank you very much indeed, Colleen. And it's a real pleasure to be with you today. I'm very pleased to be here. My name is Duncan McQueen, and I'll be speaking on behalf of IED, but also drawing on experiences from the Forest and Farm facility, which is a multi-donor trust fund that directly funds forest and farm producer organizations. I'm the last of a series of speakers. Ten others have gone before me. And you may well have heard, we've had David Gantz, Victor Lopez, Caroline Scanlon, Bishma Subedi from Nepal, Milagre Novunga, Erika Svensson, Kim Joanne Farrell, Fernanda Rodriguez, Marcus Colchester, and Cecile and Jevet last week. So I'm an exalted company, and it's a great pleasure to be here. I've had a slight change to my title in that I'm going to talk about organizational innovations that make community forestry prosperous. The original word was viable. And the reason for the change is that I think we can do better than viable. Please excuse the cluttered slides. I've added a little bit of extra information because I know they'll be posted afterwards for students on the website. So why prosperous? Why prosperity? Well, I think prosperity is a key notion because we need to know what we're aiming for. And prosperity is about the pursuit of value, values that people are interested in attaining, and values for the common good, not values for selfish interests. And because of that, there are a whole range of different values that different people will want. Prosperity is a negotiated vision of what people want. Therefore, communities are very good. Community organizations are very good at pursuing prosperity because they have to negotiate what values they're pursuing, rather than, say, corporate businesses that are set up for a very narrow material wealth aim for the few. So why this focus on community forestry? Well, we've got globally a continuing forest loss, and this is threatening our global climate. And we're still losing millions of hectares of forest per year. The drivers of that loss are lying elsewhere other than community forestry. It's an industrial agriculture primarily, industrial forestry and fires that are the main drivers. Recent research is showing just how important community forestry is in protecting forests. In fact, just a few weeks ago, David Keimovitz published a new book on forest governance by indigenous and tribal peoples to showcase how important indigenous peoples and local communities are for protecting forests, preserving biodiversity and maintaining climate resilient landscapes. The other reason for community forestry is the collective scale of forest and farm smallholders is huge. We've estimated an IUCN report estimated 1.3 trillion annually. These people control already 26% of the world's forests and 40% of the protected areas. And that's just where their rights have been formally recognised. They inhabit much larger areas than that. Also in the wake of COVID, we've seen the fragility of supply chains and the need for sustainable local production. So community forestry really very important. But community forestry is not one thing. There are very diverse forest landscapes from natural tropical forests where indigenous people have customary control in territories through immigrant communities on the forest margins where you have often quite competing community forest rights with commercial and community interactions, but still natural forests. And then you have sort of large areas of forest and farm mosaic where often there are individual small holdings but aggregated together collectively in cooperatives and so on. And outside the forest itself, you have communities built around processing industries in peri urban settings. So very diverse things that I'm going to be gathering into this notion of community forestry. Very diverse too are the many value chains that are coming out of forests. Biomass energy is probably the biggest one by value, often overlooked, but also timber and non timber forest products and a whole range of services which are increasingly the subject of payment systems for biodiversity, watershed protection, carbon and so on. So how do we go about making community forestry prosperous? And in the first talk, David Gantz introduced five principles of successful community forestry, which various of the other speakers have picked up. I'm going to rephrase them slightly as the questions that these Indonesian foresters might ask if wanting to take on community forestry. If I plant or manage a tree or forest, will I benefit from it and can I sell it? That's the tenure and rights and institutional settings principle, the necessity of secure tenure. If I can sell my forest or tree, will I get a fair price for it? And that's the addressing community needs, the market access question. If I can sell it at a fair price, can I grow it to specification, keep it free of pests and diseases until I can harvest it? And that's the question of availability of natural resources and technical extension to do with silver culture and tree protection. And if yes, all of these can collective organization ensure all of these things stay in place until the tree or forest is ready to harvest. And that's the effective governance and participation question, the organizational question. And finally, if yes to all this, is collective action able to cope with the unexpected? And that's the adaptive management and learning principle that they began to introduce the flexibility we need. Now, I'm going to be making the case in this presentation that organization is focus on organization is really the entry point to prosperous community forestry. And so I'll be interested to pick up questions on that both generally at the end of this and with the students later. So where to start? And I'm saying the start point is locally accountable organizations. In one of the earlier talks by Victor Lopez, we heard of the success of community forestry in the country of Guatemala. And the forest farm facility is also supporting community forestry in Guatemala. But we're focused primarily on supporting organizations. Now within Guatemala, you can see various hierarchical tiers of organization. There are literally hundreds of local first tier producer groups producing some some producing timber, some cacao, some coffee, various herbs and spices ecotourism. And they are often grouped together under regional alliances. And those regional alliances help to aggregate product to give volume for markets or process to add value, or to provide services to the members in terms of finance or technical services. And so Federco Vera would be a good example of that. I think Victor probably talked about aquafop in the pretend. At the third level, you have a national federation and an alianza. And this serves to represent those 11 regional groups and the many hundreds of local groups with government in negotiations. And and so in 2015, when the new pro Bosco law was introduced, which commits about 20 million US dollars a year to forest and agroforestry producers, many of the specific conditions of how that money would be dispersed were negotiated with the alianza so that they actually reach smallholders and community groups. At the regional level, you've got the alianza, Miso americana, the pueblos e bosques. And that's a sort of an alliance that has been working with other indigenous groups in big campaigns for the global climate cop, like if not us, then who that that sort of strategy. So these organizations at different levels are really important for prosperous community forestry. Moving now to FFF support for Togo, you can see again that the support we're giving is to various tiered structures within the country of Togo. And I want to emphasize here, one of our strategies has been to link community forestry groups into farmer federations, farmer organizations, because those farmer organizations are often better resourced, and they have better market connections and they have better political representation. And so a little group, a women's group called Noviva that you can see, a cassava processing women's group is linked under the Center for Producers of Serial, and they themselves belong to the Togo Lee's Federation of Farm Producers, and that federation belongs to a regional West African farmers organization called Ropa. But the work that Noviva are doing is actually agroforestry to become climate resilient, planting leucine lucasephala in agroforestry systems to improve soil fertility for their cassava and developing a range of other innovations like processing and packaging technologies. So forestry groups linked into farmer groups. Oh, this is a slide that needs a little bit of clicking. So we're moving now to FFF support in Ecuador. One of the first steps of building strong organizations is to try and mainstream organizational risk assessment. We heard Fernanda Rodriguez talk about the challenges of doing community forestry in the Amazon, and they are indeed challenging environments, these environments. And here we have an NTFP business in Ecuador, a community forestry group who are selling a tea called Guayusa. I hope I got that right. And they did a risk assessment which showed that they were really not capturing much of the value of their products in the value chain. And so they developed a strategy to try and vertically integrate in the value chain to take on some new steps. So instead of just planting and caring for the tea, they now involved in the technical support and purchasing of seedlings, purchasing the material from farmers, pre-drying and then packing for wholesale to the trader company. And that means that they capture a lot more of the value and that gives them greater prosperity and resilience. Moving now to FFF support in Bolivia, I wanted again to highlight a particular importance of organization. So in this case, organized federations that are changing policy, Marcus Colchester in his talk explained how Aman, the indigenous group in Indonesia, had worked to have customary law over forest, adept law recognized in Indonesia. Here in Bolivia, we've been supporting local first-tier cocoa producers, which is cocoa under forest. And they've grouped to form a second-tier regional association called Coprasal. And they themselves belong to a third-tier national federation called Coyek. But the second-tier regional association negotiated with government and effectively made the case, we're one of your big export crops, we need an incentive program. And so with the government, they developed a 37 million US dollar cocoa incentive program, which is going to be distributed over five years. So the power of organization to lobby for policy, enabling policy change. And now moving to some work of FFF in Ghana, one of the challenges of community forestry is getting business to work. It's often remote environments long value chains, difficult situations. And it's not often profitable for business incubators, for technical service providers to operate in those remote environments. So one of the strategies has been to use organization, apex level federations and unions, and to install business incubation within those units. So here in Ghana, just last year, they formed the Federation GAFAP, which is the Ghana Federation of Forest and Farm Producers. How it works is that local forest and farm organizations, you can see them all down the bottom, forest and farm producer organizations, FFBOs in three different zones in the country, all of whom are making and selling things, so they're generating revenue, agreed to contribute to a national federation, which now has a million members. And those contributions in money terms allow for a staff that has set up a business incubation team, the BIT, and you can see the names of the specific people involved. And so they help to incubate businesses at the local community forest level, and those businesses make more money, and so the contribution to the Federation strengthens, and so more services can be provided. That's the model. Now if we move to another country moving to Vietnam, where community forestry exists, and one of the countries in the world where actually forests are expanding through small holder planting, you can see the Vietnam Farmers Union, the sort of business incubation unit they've set up. So you have local cooperatives that are kind of grouping under larger regional groups, and they are sort of providing business incubation services to their members. So in this particular example, I want to talk about how organizations can help mobilize finance. So when we started work here in 2015, there were four small groups of cinnamon growers, and those four groups of cinnamon growers realized that to become more prosperous, they wanted to establish a processing unit, but they didn't have the money to do it all on their own. So they talked through the Vietnam Farmers Union with a commercial investor. You can see him standing and smiling in the bottom picture next to the new factory, but that wasn't built at the time. He agreed to go in with them to match their funding. In Vietnam, there's actually a legal limit on how much investment can go into a cooperative 20%. So he matched their funding, and with that security, they were able to get a bank loan to install a US$3.5 million processing factory, which you can see below. Now that was installed in 2017, and by the time I visited in 2019, they had 12 different product lines of cinnamon, and they were diversifying into star anise, into silk production, and into medicinal plants. And that, so building the finance capability is possible when you organize and can collect money together. Another reason for organizing is women's empowerment. And the FFF has been working in all countries on this. I'm just going to highlight Kenya. But again, Cecil and Jebet talked a lot about gender empowerment and the importance of working at the business level, women's entrepreneurial empowerment. It's very difficult to work to overcome customary issues at the family level or at the national level. But at the business level, you can often make progress. And we've been getting understanding that actually for women's empowerment, you need within organizations, within business organizations a critical mass of women, more than 50%, so that women's voices are heard and taken seriously. You need women champions and leaders who can inspire and train and give advice. And you need women's specific training programs that can accommodate particular issues such as child care and timing of the trainings and so on. And so here in Kenya, you can see women from Thiengote, a producer group, a small community forest group in Likipia County, developing women's tree fruit businesses, which is one of those sort of all women's enterprise groups. Organization is also, I think, critical for upscaling climate solutions. And we've been documenting over the past year in the forest and farm facility different case studies, 10 different case studies from around the world of how local community forest groups are developing resilience to climate change. And Madagascar was one of the case studies. And in particular, it's four production groups who are really groups of farmers producing peanuts for a company called Manarivo AB. And so through the program support for climate resilience, they developed a whole strategy of diversifying into aromatic oils and agroforestry systems to become less dependent on a single crop. And you can see the peanut oil, which was their mainstay, gradually turning into essential aromatic oils through this company. But there are many things that local community forest groups can do to become climate resilient. We've documented 30 different options on the right hand side here. And one of the striking things in the recent work we've been doing is that when we looked at the case studies of the 10 case studies, all of them had adopted at least half, at least 15 of those climate resilience options. So we didn't pre-feed them these options. We just did separate case studies and then matched them against these options. So that goes to show that even quite localized groups are doing quite sophisticated things because they have to, if they don't adapt to climate change, they die in many cases. And so they're doing quite sophisticated things on climate resilience and doing so in ways that also mitigate climate change. And this message, this organizational message, needs to get out if we are to make community forestry the basis of prosperity and link it to some of this climate action. Another example and my final example from the FFF work is in Zambia. And here, this is an example of how organizations provide social and cultural services that leave no one behind. So you're looking at a Zambian women's basket weaving group. So they run a little community forest area and they've been planting bamboo and other things and weaving it into baskets. But one of the things that the organization allowed them to do is establish a village savings and loans association. And the idea was that this would springboard them through investment into other income generating opportunities, which they did. They invested in pig rearing, which was very lucrative and biogas production using the manure from the pigs. And both of these things were generating revenue and being a bit of a springboard towards their future. But then a drought hit two years of drought and the village savings and loans funds actually served into a safety net, a social protection safety net. And they used the money to feed the women and their families to avoid starvation. So organization can be critical to providing social protection and making sure that nobody's left behind. So what are our priorities going forward? And how do we believe we can spread these sort of innovations and many more? I haven't had a chance to talk about all of them by any means. But how can we go forward? I think one of the emphases of the new manager of the forest and farm facility is really to sort of communicate, to blend these and other organizational innovations into compelling stories, which can help to attract resources into forest and farm producer organizations, into community forestry, and make it the mainstay of rural development. So here in Nepal, you can see in the background community forest areas, 15,000, more than 15,000 of them are now grouped into an organization called FECAFUN and Bishma Subedi will have talked about that in his talk. And the FFF is providing support to FECAFUN, not just to further secure rights, which is very important in any community forest setting, but also to develop the capacity to incubate businesses and generate value and be part of REDD Plus programs and climate adaptation programs, all of those critical linking functions. And so telling that story and making it compelling, you can see European Agri agencies, Agricor published a book recently, Forest and Farm Producer Organizations, Operating Systems for the Sustainable Development Goals. And that's the sort of messaging that is both true and necessary for policy makers and financial resource partners to hear, because often people exclude community forest groups and their organizations on grounds of they couldn't possibly help us, they need too much due diligence, they're too high risk, we would argue that the risk is one of, it's a risk to leave them out, because they are the people who populate these landscapes. And I think I'm going to draw it to a close there and leave you with a lovely photo from Vietnam of a community forest group, the Muong group up in the mountains, who'd been developing a new business based on sticky rice and a variety of non timber forest products, one of them being a very potent beverage, which we used to toast at the end of the day. So with that, I'll say cheers and open this session up to any questions you might have. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Duncan, you're spot on with timing and we do have a bunch of great questions. So let me start with one from Ben Hodgdon, who asks first comments that it's great presentation, but he asks it's clear wherever prosperous, sorry, community forestry achieves scale, second and third tier organizations are key. However, there are lots of examples of such organizations supported by outside agencies that fail or that create lots of conflict. Can you talk about how FFF selects the organizations it supports and what some learnings have been around how to best support them? Ben said he was going to ask the killer question. Let's start with that. So it's a tough, a tough but very important question. And yes, we know from experience that organizations that have a set up because of outside intervention are not liable to be sustainable. They don't have the kind of the common motivation and trust built into them. I remember in Brazil when a tax loophole was open to community organizations and they sprung up like mushrooms all over Brazil and as soon as the tax incentive was changed, they all faded away. So how do you build those second and third tier organizations and make them last? In the Forest and Farm facility, we have a fairly rigorous process when we go into a country of conducting a baseline study which looks at all of the existing organizations and their sort of longevity, their track record and so on. And then there's a national meeting that's convened between those organizations, government technical support partners and the FFF and there's a sort of a selection process that takes place involving advisory committee. And so that's to really try and back organizations that have started organically and have demonstrated impetus and momentum and trust with their members. It doesn't immediately get you from lots of local community forest groups to a second tier association. One of the countries where I've been working a little bit is Indonesia and and they've got plenty of community forestry going on but no national federation and they wanted to establish one under the multi-stakeholder forest program so they invited them all together and launched a federation but of course it didn't have any sort of bottom-up impetus to it. So I think the best way of doing that is by encouraging peer-to-peer exchanges between community forest groups who are producing similar things and I think that that often can result in people seeing common interest in working together to sort of some improve their market outlook or do better advocacy and so on and of course whenever you do such exchanges you always see the idea that well have a think about or they do themselves organically. So I guess that would be my answer. It is very important that organizations coalesce around people's genuine motivations to work together and you can't fast track that but there are ways of encouraging people to think through why they might want to work together and we've done quite a lot of sensitization work in early workshops in the FFF about what are the advantages of organizing and associating and federating and that often pays dividends. Thank you so much Nankin. We've got a bunch of questions and not a bunch of minutes so I'm going to try to find I'll be faster. Some rapid questions. Here's one from Jeff Campbell asking how do we convince the larger sources of funding donor funding and private investment to recognize and support FFPOs and community forestry? Is this a communication issue, a power imbalance or a reluctance to trust local smaller scale community-based organizations? All of the above and I think we have to continue to work very hard to communicate to overcome those power imbalances and lack of trust. We have to communicate very hard that we're doing this and it's working but secondly that there are agendas that those bigger sources of finance have like global climate action and the Green Climate Fund for example has lots of money in it. The global environmental facility has lots of money in it but to demonstrate to them how local community forestry and forest and farm organizations are actually able to deliver the outcomes they want to see. These people can deliver climate change mitigation, they can deliver climate resilience, they can deliver poverty reduction, they can deliver forest landscape restoration and we need to make that message sing out loud and clear from many sources and I think eventually the penny will drop. Thanks Jeff. Sorry I'm scrolling through we're never going to get to all your questions but let me try we have one here from Marchie de Graf who asks how do you work on benefit sharing and internal governance processes within communities who collectively manage their resources. So in particular how do you balance so-called good governance principles and the principles that underlie traditional governance systems in these communities? Yeah absolutely fundamental and overlooked area of work building up the organization's accountability internal financial accountability decision making it's too big an area to cover now. There are tools out there and one of the partners of FFF is Agricor the European Agri-Agencies so they're sort of farmer organizations from Europe who have Agri-Agencies that are very experienced in organizational governance people like Agritare and Triass and FFD and so on. So we use their experience to try and build support for organizational development sort of maturing organizations. Sorry I'm going back and oops going back and forth between the screens here so we have another question asking about just the the kind of landscape question can biodiversity be maintained with a geometrically organized planting of trees presuming an orderly array is easier to maintain and harvested? Oh this is such a fascinating and interesting question you know biodiversity is very important we're working up to the biodiversity cop we know biodiversity loss and extinction is critical and and we have to balance the needs of nature with the needs of people and and economics and yes it is often more efficient to grow trees in plantation economically more efficient I think the way to handle that no agronomic diversity is ever going to equal natural biodiversity. So as Q Gardens recently ran an excellent seminar on on forest restoration the priority is on the one hand to make sure that there are areas of natural forest that are preserved within landscapes because that's where really your biodiversity is conserved but also in the farm landscape the agro biodiversity to make sure that it's not uniform monocultures but is rather diverse small holdings within which some of the crops including tree crops might be planted in blocks but in a kind of mosaic pattern with various options for the farmers so one of the real risks for example in Vietnam a lot of small holder farmers have gone into a caesium angium plantation for example no large monocultures of caesium angium which is now suffering from a range of climate stressed pests and diseases that's obviously bad news for the farmers so making sure that they have themselves diversified their tree crops and their other agricultural crops is a way of maintaining the agronomic biodiversity to safeguard their livelihoods and then maintaining sort of sheltered belts preferably connected of natural forest in the landscape is the way of conserving the biodiversity. Thank you so much Duncan. I'm sorry to our attendees that we still have another dozen questions in the queue here but what we'll do is I'll share them with you we'll preserve the chat we'll share them with you and maybe you'll be able to respond directly to those attendees. I want to just thank you for that you had the huge challenge of tying together the entire series which you were masterful at managing but also for really deepening our understanding about the importance of these tiered organizational structures that will allow community forestry not only to be resilient but also the opportunity to be prosperous and we're so grateful for your sharing your experience with our audience and to our attendees thank you so much for joining us for being part of the series I encourage you to reach out to us in the Yale Forest Forum we'll be organizing another series in the next academic year. Ben is going to put in the chat our email address if you'd like to make suggestions to us of topics that you would like to see in future if you're interested in this is part of a course here at the Yale Forest School and if you're interested in the forest school at the Yale School of the Environment Ben will also put in the chat how you can get involved in the application to our school so I invite you to reach out to us to the attendees and to Duncan again thank you so much really appreciate your great presentation. Pleasure it's all mine thank you very much for for putting up with me. Bye everyone.