A Preliminary Review of British Columbia's Community Forest Pilot Project

Amid recent crises in British Columbia’s forest sector, forest-dependent communities have increasingly called for greater involvement in forest planning as they real-ize that traditional forest management does not effec-tively address their interests. In response, the provincial government introduced the Community Forest Pilot Project (CFPP) and offered forest tenures to ten com-munities in 1999 and 2000. Despite high hopes, the ini-tial progress of the original pilots through to March, 2004, with the exception of a few isolated success sto-ries, has been less than impressive. While some explana-tion for this can be found within the attributes and cir-cumstances of individual pilots, surveying of key informants from each pilot suggests that there are also aspects of the CFPP as designed and implemented that appear to have made it difficult for some community forests to achieve their aims