SSince the mid 1990s, Bolivia has made

efforts to create an enabling policy environ-

ment for community forestry. The 1996

forestry and agrarian reform laws recog-

nised smallholders and indigenous groups

as legitimate forest users, and decentralised

many of the previously centralised gover-

nance responsibilities to regional and

municipal governments. Both the FAO and

UNDP have praised Bolivia for their political

will to decentralise and modernise the gov-

ernance structure of the country’s forestry

sector.^1 The reforms allow for local commu-

nities and individuals to acquire formal

rights to manage forests, either as individ-

ual or as common property.

The enforcement of these property rights,

however, is still very much a top-down

affair, and it is unclear whether the reforms

have actually increased the forest tenure

security of rural dwellers. In this paper we

examine the influence of past and present

forestry policies on local forest user deci-

sions, paying particular attention to the

influence they have had on two key condi-

tions associated with secure forest tenure:

(1) A mutually recognised and clear delin-

eation of the forest resources by both gov-

ernmental authorities and local forest users,

and (2) Legal power for local users to

exclude and regulate the use of the forest

that they claim, either individually or as a

group.^2 The thematically focused historical

analysis of forest governance in Bolivia pro-

vides several insights into the realistic possi-

bilities and limitations of contemporary

forestry policies.

Forest governance in Bolivia

Bolivia is one of the poorest and richest

countries in the world. It is poor in the

sense that more than half of its rural popu-

lation suffers from some degree of malnour-

ishment.^3 As a matter of fact, the current

inequalities in terms of both income and

assets are one of the highest of the region.

But at the same time, Bolivia is rich when it

comes to its endowment of natural

resources. In 1851, Gibbon described his

encounter with the lowland forests: “all the

silver and gold of Peru are not to be com-

pared with the undeveloped commercial

History, cculture aand cconservation

The hhistorical oorigins oof mmodern fforestry ppolicy iin

Bolivia— TThe cchallenge tto ggovern aa vvast lland

Krister AAndersson aand DDiego PPacheco

Summary.This article offers a fresh perspective on the latest round of reforms in Bolivia’s forestry sec-
tor. Advocates claim that such reforms have improved the conditions for community forestry in the coun-
try. We analyze how public policies in the forestry sector have evolved over time, and pay particular atten-
tion to how different governmental regimes have dealt with the problem of forest tenure insecurity for
smallholders and indigenous groups. Using historical narratives, we discuss the proposition that the devo-
lution of de jureforest property rights to local user groups is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to
improve the security of forest tenure for the rural poor. We attribute the failures of past policies to a lack
of fit between the coercive, government-engineered institutions and the reality of local forest users.
Efforts to improve forestry sector governance in Bolivia, and other non-industrial countries, will be more
effective, we argue, when the public policy process is capable of capitalizing on existing institutional
arrangements that local groups have created to provide a variety of self-organised collective goods and
services.