a case study from Lishu village, Sichuan, China Tan, Jingzheng creator Dale, Reidar Chairperson Sorpath Pongquan Examination Committee Fisher, Robert J. Examination Committee The Ford Foundation Scholarship Donor Asian Institute of Technology Scholarship Donor Regional Community Forestry Training Center (RECOFTC), Bangkok Scholarship Donor text series technical report th Bangkok Asian Institute of Technology 1999 continuing eng 153 leaves ; ill. Community forestry has been introduced into China to address the existing community forest management problems and to achieve sustainable economic and environmental sound better forest management since the early 1990s. About 10 years' experiences have showed that, like other rural development projects, community forestry projects remain primarily foresters' (outsiders') projects rather than community projects. Very often, with the over sufficient strong external funding and human resources support, the projects can run well within the artificial enviromnent. However, with the end of project funding and external human resources, the community remains almost the same as it used to be. Making full use of (and/or strengthening) indigenous management systems and building local capability are only recognized in many project documents rather than in project implementation. Why community forestry in China is not so successful yet so far to achieve its expressed goals? Possible reason to the failure is that the importance and role of community organizations in cormnunity forest management is not well understood. The appropriate methodologies of strengthening community organizations are not well developed within the Chinese context by the project designers and implementers. This study is an attempt to identify and analyze the contributions, constraints and oppo1tunities and develop methodology for improving functioning of community organizations in community forest management. The results of this study from the selected village revealed that the production group plays an important role in decision-making and planning in collective forest management. It was also found that transparency, communication, consensus and agreement among the villagers within the production group are the crucial factors to forest management plans and rules' formulation and implementation. Therefore, they are characterized as the bottleneck for villagers' participation in the use and management of their forest resources. An action research process was followed to implement identified strategies to assist and strengthen the functioning of community organization in resources management in production group No.6 of the studied village. It aimed to develop an appropriate methodology to assist community organizations to play a better role in collective forest management with more sustainable and participatory manner. During the action research process, a series of methods and tools were developed and adapted in the implementation of the identified strategies. A comparison between the past situation and the new situation in the same production group were made to illustrate the significant difference between the situations before and after the action. Finally, some specific recommendations to the follow up activities for this studied village and some general recommendations were made for existing and new community forestry projects. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, School of Environment, Resources and Development Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1999 Community forests China Sichuan Asian Institute of Technology. http://203.159.5.9/ait-thesis/detail.php?q=B12636 http://203.159.5.9/ait-thesis/detail.php?q=B12636 070400 20260818222747.0