Community Forestry in Bhutan and Montana

Community forestry refers to a complex amalgam of trends in decentralized environmental governance, economic development, and responses to contingent historical and geographical factors. In this presentation Dr. Belsky compares the forces behind and responses to market forces in two places cele-brated for forest landscapes and livelihoods: the Himalayan country of Bhutan and the state of Montana. Community forestry in Bhutan is a highly prescribed government-led effort to decentralize forest management in the context of creating a modern, market-based economy. In con-trast, community forestry efforts in Montana are bottoms-up, public-private collaborations to counteract privatization and development threats to forestlands resulting from neo-liberal market forces underlying corporate timberland divestment