Day 2 @ Work

A very bad picture
 of our office space (sorry!)

We started the day earlier today to meet with our adviser and discuss our options. We are still fuzzy on the exact details but it seems like we are move in the broad direction of Community Based Forestry Management (CBFM) and Enterprises (CBFE), with a possible focus on rattan. As someone with no experience with forest and land issues, I have known right from the beginning that I have a lot of learning to do. Before I can delve into the specifics of CBFM in Thua Thien-Hue, which is where we will work, I need to understand how it works in general and then in Vietnam. I realized that I am using a funnel approach to learning and as I learn about the environmental aspects, I am also trying to understand how the political and social structure plays out at the macro, meso and micro levels (an approach I learned from one of my professors in Fall 2013).

Here is what I have figured out so far:

CBFM: "the management, by communities or smallholders, of forests and agroforests they own, as well as the management of state-owned forests (some of which share customary tenure and rights under traditional laws and practice) by communities."

CBFE: "comprise smallholder and community-scale economic activities or collective enterprises based on wood and non-wood forest products and the provision of ecosystem services, including ecotourism."
Silviculture: growing and cultivation of trees

Source: Community-Based Forest Management: The Extent and Potential Scope of Community and Smallholder Forest Management and Enterprises (Augusta Molnar, Marina France, Lopaka Purdy and Jonathan Karver)

It seemed like the Land Law of 2003 and the Forest Protection and Development Act of 2004 played a key role in incentivizing CBFM and until then it was encouraged but no provisions were made legally. I found a bunch of helpful tables and diagrams about the timeline of implementation, the CBFM model and the differences in the traditional and modern forms of forest management.

It also seems that property is the claim, access is the benefit from the claim, endowment again a claim on a stream, entitlement is specific stream of benefits. Rights need to be supplemented with the ability to claim them. An access analysis helps identify why some individuals and communities benefit while others don't/

Of course, I have many questions and tons of more things to read and learn about. I doubt if this is very interesting to the general audience, but perhaps if you are an MDP/Humphrey student you may know more about this and can guide me to good resources:

1. How does official land use titling work? What exactly is the red book?
2. What kind of land property rights exist in Vietnam? Is it leased to communities or do they own it?
3. What is the entitlement approach to land use?
4. What sort of grants did UNDP give for sustainable forest management and do these tie in to any of the other programs?
5. Where can I access data about Community Forest Management policies and practices in Vietnam?
6. How much land is managed by the government and how much is by communities? How does this split up into the 3 different kinds of forests?
7. Are there fixed stages in CBFM implementation in Vietnam? Which of these are necessary and which can be optional?

It was also interesting to come across an article that highlighted how efforts such as the UN REDD+ actually work against the objective of decentralization. First, they provide funds thus addressing the lack of funding motivation that drives decentralization. Second, y focusing on carbon sequestration and credits, they require central monitoring and evaluation.