Changing Forests: Collective Action, Common Property, and Coffee in Honduras

1. Introduction.- Forest Change and the Challenge of Sustainable Management.- Political Ecology, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources.- Situating the Study Site.- Conceptualizing Community.- Overview of the Book.- 2. People and Forests in Historical Perspective.- People and Forests in Prehistoric Mesoamerica.- The Spanish Conquest.- Land Rights, Population, and Implications for the Forests.- Community Governance and Communal Land: The Roots of a Communitarian Tradition.- La Campa Becomes a Municipio.- Rituals, Beliefs, and Natural Resources among the Lenca.- Synthesis.- 3. Governing the Commons and Making a Living.- La Campa's Common-Property Regime in Theoretical Context.- Municipal Government and the Communitarian Tradition.- The Forest-Field-Fallow Cycle.- Livelihoods and Risk-Reduction Strategies.- Forest Management Practices and Institutions.- The Question of Conservation.- 4. Logging Comes to La Campa: State Intervention, Forest Transformation, and Collective Action.- Development Goals Prompt Timber Sales.- Honduras Nationalizes the Forestry Sector.- Social Forestry System Offers Alternatives for La Campa.- Theory vs. Reality in Forest Management Philosophy and Outcomes.- The State or the Community: Who should manage the forest?- The Exacerbation of Tensions: Fines, Fires, and Broken Bridges.- Assessing State Intervention and the Mixed Success of Collective Action.- Forest Destruction and the Birth of a Conservation Ethic.- 5. Common-Property Transformations and Market Integration.- Forest Protection Efforts and De Facto Privatization of Common-Property Forests.- The Promise of Coffee.- Political and Economic Incentives for Coffee Expansion.- Land Titling under the National Agrarian Institute.- Coffee and Inequality.- Forest-Change Dynamics.- 6. Coffee Culture, Crisis, and Adaptation.- Global and Local Dimensions of the CoffeeCrisis, 1999 - 2003.- Hardship and Resilience in the Coffee Crisis.- Adaptations to the Coffee Crisis.- Case Studies of

From the reviews:"A principal argument in the book is that the community's relative success in maintaining forests is due to institutional factors that have been found elsewhere to lead to successful common property management ... . Changing Forests is intended for environmental scientists and policymakers, conservationists, social foresters, ecological and environmental anthropologists and economists, sociologists, geographers, development analysts, and Latin America specialists. ... It is particularly important for those concerned with collective action and common property and is a worthy addition to libraries ... ." (Patricia L. Howard, Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 29 (4), November, 2009)