While community forestry has shown promise to reduce rural poverty, improve reforestation and
potentially offset carbon emissions, many projects have failed, either partly or completely. In order to
understand why community forestry succeeds or fails, we examined in detail the literature related to
community forestry from three countries, Mexico, Nepal and the Philippines. We also drew on
experiences in other countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. We identified
five main interconnected
factors which the literature suggests are often critical to the success of community forestry. To integrate
the many ways in which community forestry projects can improve the state of these factors, we use the
concept of ‘bonding social capital’, i.e. communities’ ability to work together towards a common aim and
‘bridging social capital’, i.e. their ability to liaise with the outside world. To understand the interaction of
the
five success factors and the way in which improvements to bonding or bridging social capital may
affect them, we developed a causal diagram which depicts the interrelationships between the success
factors and the key points at which project inputs may be best applied. It is clear from our analysis that
failing to appreciate both the complexity and interaction of the various influences may lead to project
failure.