M. A. Conny Davidsen

          Conny Davidsen (Deutschland)











Titel der Dissertation

Comparative stakeholder analysis of community forestry concepts in the Americas.

wissenschaftlicher Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Pretzsch

Projektbeschreibung / Description

While great agreement has been achieved in recognizing a large potential of local institutional structures to effectively organize forest use on the local level, there is still a substantial knowledge gap in understanding the interaction dynamics and effects of institutional arrangements in community forestry. The PhD research project aims at a better systemic understanding of the social organization and decision-making mechanism behind community-based forest management models as they are designed to solve distributional conflicts of resource access and benefits.
The investigated community forestry concepts located in South, Central and North America offer an interesting spectrum of different forestry approaches insofar as their forest tenure and property systems differ, while at the same time forest conservation and political self-determination are in all cases deeply grounded in the implemented forestry model and shape the constellation of stakeholders and interests. The research focuses on the causal relationships behind stakeholder interests and cooperation, which are determined by different policy beliefs  and interaction behaviour among the actors.

The methodological approach employs a historical analysis and a critical application of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). The ACF offers a pluralistic actor-based policy network approach that takes a multi-linked and non-hierarchical actor constellation into account. The historical approach, on the other hand,allows for an extraction of historically specific differences and facilitates the causal exploration of the stakeholders conceptual network behaviour in the long run.

The project's substantial objectives aim at a review of the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the implemented forestry models, in order to provide policy recommendations for their improvement. Secondly, one methodological objective of the research is to review the theoretical framework for its application in Latin America contexts, since the ACF has hardly been empirically tested in a Latin American context so far. This will contribute to our understanding of the theory's validity and applicability, and provide recommendations for modification of the model if necessary.