How and why forests are often managed collectively: a systematic review of facilitating and hindering factors of collective actions

In a context where the world is rapidly changing, due to societal and environmental challenges, forest ecosystems play a fundamental role. Forests around the world provide multiple benefits to human societies that derive from Ecosystem Services (MEA, 2005). The level and spectrum of forest Ecosystem Services (ES) provided depends on forest management objectives,(Pukkala, 2016), that in turn is largely dependent on the forest owners, and by the legal framework (Nichiforel et al., 2020). More often than not, forest ownership is divided among different owners, hence the management, along with its effectiveness in improving the ecosystem services provision, of a fragmented forest and landscape is limited (Mitchell et al., 2015). There is growing scientific evidence (Fischer et al., 2019, Kittredge, 2005) that supports forms of management at landscape level, therefore involving several forest owners. These Collective Action approaches (CA) can be the cause of emergence of common pool resources issues. In this context, a key problem faced by policy makers in addressing such issue is understand what are the elements that facilitate or hinder collective action for forest management. Our work is a systematic literature review on the topic. The review scope included many types of CA, from forest owners’ associations to participatory forest management, community forests and others.