CHAPTER: 2
Concept of Forest Management
2.1. Forest management:
Forest management is the branch of forestry concerned with the overall administrative, economic, legal, and social aspects and with the essentially scientific and technical aspects, especially silviculture, protection, and forest regulation. This includes management for aesthetics, fish, recreation, urban values, water, wilderness, wildlife, wood products, and other forest resource values. Management can be based on conservation, economics, or a mixture of the two. Techniques include the extraction timber, planting and replanting of various species, cutting roads and pathways through forests, and preventing of fire.
In other words, “forest management is the application of business methods and technical forestry principles to the operation of a forest property.”
Management of forests broadly includes three main tasks:
Ø Control of composition and structure of growing stock.
Ø Harvesting and marketing of forest produce.
Ø Administration of forest property personnel.
Objectives of forest management:
Ø Maintaining and as far as possible raising the productive capacity of the soil and of the forest stand consistent with the maximum site potential.
Ø Promoting the protective effect of the forest, against soil erosion, floods and protection of the physical factor, such as natural scenery, local flora and fauna.
Ø Execution of silviculture operations and regulation of fellings in such a way so as to bring the forest to a condition of as near normality as possible, in simple words, attaining of a normal forest is one of the principle objects.
Ø Satisfaction of rights of the right holders in respect of timber, fire wood, grazing etc. in particular and to meet the bonafied requirements of the local people in general.
Ø Providing the highest possible volume of valuable timber for constructional & industrial purpose and other forest produce for meeting the market demands and securing the highest possible financial results.
In developed countries, the environment has increased public awareness of natural resource policy, including forest management. As a direct result, primary concerns regarding forest management have shifted from the extraction of timber to other forest resources including wildlife, watershed management, and recreation. This shift in public values has also caused many in the public to mistrust resource management professionals.
2.2. Regimes of forest management:
Till the very beginning of forest management practices, it has undergone shifts. Over time, various types of management practices were practiced around the world to fulfill different kinds of objectives. All those management practices are broadly classified into four management regimes. They are:
1. Dominant use or timber primacy: it is the oldest type of management practice over the world. The dominant use approach has experienced significant changes. Benign and gentle harvesting has been largely accepted as a new criterion, especially among western-trained resource professionals, with a focus on harvesting trees in ways that cause minimum undesirable disturbances to the soil and wildlife habitat. While there is a relative decline in the area of operable forests under active management for timber production purposes, zonation has become a common practice and a case in point is the establishment of nature reserves off-limits to timber harvesting activities. Many of these nature reserves have been created in the interests of preserving biodiversity because they contain ‘high conservation value forests’.
2. Multiple uses versus wood compatibility or joint production: aside from the long tradition in using forest resources for multiple purposes (see Gregory, 1955; McArdle, 1953; Pearson, 1944; Dana, 1943), forests are increasingly managed for an array of objectives, for instance, for wildlife (Carey, 2003), for recreation and conservation (Lacaze, 2000), and for biodiversity (Carey et al., 1999). The concept of multiple forest management objectives was promoted in Europe in the early 1950s, thanks to the contribution by Victor Dieterich, but, unfortunately, his work is not referenced in the English- language literature. In evaluating forest management options, trade-offs are often considered for competing objectives. Haynes and Monserud (2002) argue that resource professionals need to search for potential opportunities for compatibility in outputs (either goods or services) among alternative management strategies; hence, they propose a conceptual model of wood compatibility to examine biophysical and socio-economic compatibility in managing forests. The wood compatibility approach is consistent with the multi- product management approach that Weigand (1998) alluded to, and the main objective of any compatible forest management regime is to search for the compatibility of timber and non-timber values.
3. Co-management: it is also known as joint management of forests by partners or, simply, shared production, is gaining popularity in recent years, amid growing demand and pressure for jointly managing various values that arise from the forest (Duschesne, 2003). Vira (1999, p. 99) defines ‘shared production’ as a regime that produces goods or services by employing inputs from multiple economic agents. Instead of maximizing returns to a single principal, the objective function in a shared production regime is jointly determined by the partners who are involved in the production process.
4. Multiple interest forestry: one stage further than co-management is what is known as the stakeholder's approach, or multiple interest forestry. According to the general definition that Grimble et al. (1995) provided, stakeholders are those that affect, and/or are affected by, policies, decisions, and actions. Stakeholders can be individuals, communities, social groups or institutions. It may be argued that the distinction between the co-management regime and multiple interest forestry is not clear-cut. Kant (2003) suggested that co-management emerged due to growing interest in forestry, resulting in a greater degree of multiplicity in forest management objectives. Compared with the co-management regime, multiple interest forestry is characterized by the multiplicity of voices and values. In a multiple interest forestry regime, partnership is the key and negotiation is essential.
Of these four regimes, the first two may be classified under the category of technical management of forests (i.e., how to manage forests more efficiently, from an output perspective), and the last two are concerned with the institutional aspects of forest management (i.e., who manages forests, managing forests for whom, and how to share the benefits and costs among stakeholders). From the standpoint of economic analysis, the progression of the forest management regimes may be viewed as a change in treating institutional factors as exogenous variables in the first two regimes and as endogenous variables in the latter two. An important distinction is that, while institutional arrangements were generally assumed as given in economic analyses of traditional forest management regimes, institutional considerations act as explicit inputs in contemporary forest planning and operation.
