Comparison of Rural Livelihoods between Government-led and Local-led Initiatives under Community-based Forest Management: A Case Study in Chin State, Myanmar

Promoting forest conservation as well as the wellbeing of forest adjacent people requires an appropriate balance of regulation, enforcement, and incentives. The implementation of community-based forest (CBF) in Myanmar continues facing many challenges especially in a local area like Chin Sate. This study investigates the contribution of community-based forest management to livelihoods, conservation and governance by comparing different cases under the government-led and local-led initiatives. It aims at identifying the constraint factors, which should be considered to be promoted by involving interviews with key informants, focus group discussions, and the 101 randomly selected households' survey using structured questionnaires, field observation, and literature reviews. This research identifies that the community-based forest provides a wide range of benefits to a local community for their livelihood's matter, in spite of no direct cash income gained from the CBF, such as easily accessible to local construction materials; access to edible forest products during hardship time; protection of ecosystem services; social cohesion; and community awareness. The most notable benefit in the government-led initiative is household building materials, while protection and recreation service is regarded as the highest in the local-led initiative. Despite such benefits, there are still several constraints to meet a genuine participatory forest development complementing the dual objectives of livelihood's improvement and forest regeneration. Thus, strategic steps to take include providing technical skills and incentives for conservation, promoting social recognition and empowerment, exploring and integrating indigenous knowledge, and protecting community rights.