Measuring sustainability indicators for Community Forest Management: a trial run on two case studies in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Natural forests and the livelihoods of people are intrinsically linked all over the world, and a sizeable portion of the world’s forests are under some level of community-based management. Community Forest Management refers to a variety of forest uses partially or entirely decided and performed by several or all members of a community. Multiple actors in and outside of academia have championed CFM as a sustainable approach to land management and resource use, but the forms CFM can take are so diverse that the label is no guarantee of sustainability. The expanding body of scientific literature exploring the sustainability of CFM efforts has a bias towards environmental aspects, relatively lacking on the number of studies addressing the social and particularly the economic dimensions of sustainability. Given that measuring sustainability is a challenging task, a variety of methods for doing it have become popular, one of them being the use of indicators. This study set out to apply, for the first time, one such indicators tool developed by The Nature Conservancy with two ejidos in Quintana Roo, Mexico. The specific aims of the work were to measure the baseline of the indicators in the communities and complement these results with an identification of the main challenges to sustainable CFM that the ejidos faced. Through this, the links reported in the literature between pre-existing socioeconomic conditions and sustainability in forest management were supported, and an array of empirical tools were identified that could contribute to simplify and maintain the monitoring in the long run and tweak the indicators to render them more informative and useful.