ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyse two forest-based communities with well-established community-based forest enterprises (CFEs) for timber production: Noh-Bec, an ejido with 36 years of CFE experience in southeast Mexico; and Arimum, a community with 14 years of CFE experience in a federal extractive reserve in the Brazilian Amazon. We contrast their struggles for community rights to forests in each region and describe each CFE’s initiation and current implementation. We utilise the Community Capitals Framework to contextualise each community’s initial assets and identify the types of community forestry–related local investments made by community members and others, and examine ways in which changes in community capitals relate to three broad dimensions of these communities’ well-being. We find similarities in cultural ties to the forest, investments in social and built capital, and financial capital challenges. We find differences in sources of support as well as human and natural capital. We observe that engagement in forest management for timber production by these two communities has been an important way (but certainly not the only way) for them to harness and leverage investments in their community capitals, which, in turn, have contributed to improvements in well-being, especially material well-being in the form of income.
