Environmental Governance as Embedded Process: Managing Change in Two Community-Based Forestry Organizations

Community-based forestry (CBF) represents an environmental governance strategy that promotes democratic practices, strengthens local livelihoods, and sustains forest ecosystems for the benefit of all community members. Much prior research has explored the necessary conditions for successful CBF operation. Less attention has been paid to how established CBF organizations, as they near the end of the start-up phase of operations, change in response to shifting political, economic, social, and environmental conditions. Drawing on "new economic sociology" concepts of embeddedness, this interdisciplinary study compares organizational transitions in the Public Lands Partnership in Colorado and the Association of Forest Communities of Peten in Guatemala. The paper conceptualizes these empirical cases as processes of organizational change embedded in multi-scalar contexts rather than sets of static structures best designed a priori. Important organizational changes are closely linked to the multiple embeddedness of the groups' diverse activities in complex contexts of varying actors, objectives, and perspectives on organizational objectives. Organizational contradictions emerging from this multiple embeddedness are argued to be features of these community-based groups that help produce moments of "structural choice" in which participants seek to maintain organizational effectiveness and legitimacy. An embeddedness analytical approach suggests that criteria for judging success cannot be predetermined, but rather are shaped by these contingent processes of structural choice.