Community Forest Enterprise success factors

Eli Prins, Louise Janseune, Andries Polinder, Mark van Benthem, November 2024

Community Forest Enterprises (CFEs) are organizations of forest communities that manage the use of community forests, including harvesting, processing, and selling timber and other forest products. CFEs can provide social, economic, and environmental benefits to forest communities and others. However, the success chances of CFEs are dependent on many factors.

This report aims to describe these success factors by means of a literature review. The literature review is presented in the main report, which describes the most important success factors for CFEs in tropical regions around the world based on existing literature, by combining CFE meta-analyses and case studies. The Annex then discusses the implications of the report for the Surinamese context, specifically the SUSTAME project.

This report was written as part of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Lab SUSTAME (SUStainable Timber in SurinAME) project. Stichting Probos and its partner ESS designed a project under the SUSTAME umbrella that aims to implement sustainable forestry systems and practices in Suriname, with a focus on Indigenous and Maroon communities, by implementing a market-based approach to develop community forest operations and find a market for their forest products.