Criteria and indicators for the assessment of community forestry outcomes: a comparative analysis from Canada

• Socio-economic outcomes of four Canadian community forests are evaluated.
• Evaluation dimensions include governance, economic benefits, multiple forest use.
• Two cases exhibit greater participatory dimensions to governance.
• The greatest source of local benefits is through employment and local processing.
• Not all case studies choose to manage forests according to a multi-use approach.

In Canada, there are few structured evaluations of community forestry despite more than twenty years of practice. This article presents a criteria and indicator framework, designed to elicit descriptive information about the types of socio-economic results being achieved by community forests in the Canadian context. The criteria and indicators framework draws on themes proposed by other researchers both in the field of community forestry and related areas. The framework is oriented around three concepts described as amongst the underlying objectives of community forestry, namely participatory governance, local economic benefits and multiple forest use. This article also presents the results of a field-based application of the criteria and indicators framework, comparing four case studies in three Canadian provinces. All four are community forests with direct tenure rights to manage and benefit from forestry activities. Results reveal that in terms of governance, the case studies adhere to two different models, which we name ‘interest group’ vs. ‘local government’. Stronger participatory dimensions are evident in two case studies. In the area of local economic benefits, the four case studies perform similarly, with some of the strongest benefits being in employment creation, especially for those case studies that offer non-timber activities such as recreation and education. Two of four cases have clearly adopted a multiple-use approach to management.