Community forestry engagement with market forces: A comparative perspective from Bhutan and Montana

• Community forestry in Bhutan and Montana reveal different institutional arrangements and engagements with market forces
• Bhutan’s national community forestry program is developing forest product markets with safeguards and regulations
• In Montana a collaboration responds to neoliberal restructuring by purchasing and reselling divested corporate timberlands
• Market forces in community forestry provide threats and opportunities to reconcile forest protection and local livelihood

This paper asks: (1) how has community forestry been informed by the ascendancy of particular forms of neoliberal restructuring and rise in market-based interests in environmental governance and (2) how has its engagement with these market forces affected its effectiveness in meeting the objective to reconcile livelihood and environmental protection? Towards answering these questions the paper examines two places known for their forest landscapes and livelihoods and with community forestry activities: the Himalayan country of Bhutan and the U.S. western state of Montana. Bhutan's top-down, national community forestry program and Montana's bottoms-up, collaborative effort known as the Montana Legacy Program are shown to be highly different not only in their institutional arrangement but also in their engagements with particular forms of neoliberalism including type of markets, regulatory processes, market opportunities, and the role of the private sector. Their differences reveal important ways that market forces and market-oriented interests shape threats as well as solutions to meeting forest protection and livelihood objectives in the two contexts, but produce unpredictable partnerships and awkward contradictions in the process.