The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the opportunities and threats to increasing forestry’s contribution to poverty reduction. The analysis examines the international, national, and local arenas and the drivers of change at these different levels. It questions the extent to which pro-poor policy is already in place. It examines critically the nature of poverty as a basis from which to assess the extent to which changing ownership and access patterns are bringing greater livelihood security to the rural poor. It uses poverty as the starting point for looking at forest policy rather than looking at forestry and seeing how it can be made to accommodate a more pro-poor approach.
The paper looks back on what has been achieved so far in terms of poverty reduction through forestry. It unpacks the assumptions underpinning much of the support to “pro-poor” forestry. The second part develops an approach to pro-poor forestry. It analyses the critical factors that shape the potential for pro-poor policy including an analysis of the nature and understanding of poverty to ensure clarity in debate about who the poor are and thus what the differential effects of forest policy and tenure change are on them. It builds on notions of vulnerability, insecurity, and well-being. It examines the nature of the state and its structures, civil and political society, and some of the overarching trends that enable or disable pro-poor policy. The appendix uses the analysis to look at the particular example of the Nepal Swiss Community Forestry Project and its highly innovative approaches to using community forestry as a springboard to tackling the deeper structural issues of extreme poverty in rural Nepal.