In the post-UNCED world, there is increasing awareness of the need to intensify and improve the dialogue on appropriate forest management. Obviously, this dialogue must involve all groups interested in the forests, and particularly actual users of forest resources.
Forestry extension is about the dynamic and systematic process of forest sector technical experts interacting with other partners to advance sustainable development and sound forestry. To date, however, it has struggled under several historical tendencies that have limited its effectiveness and even the recognition of the need for this type of approach. First, in many cases the historical concerns of governments were for the protection of a limited forest estate where the government itself was responsible for management. Second, as agricultural extension spread, it became a top-down mechanism through which governments attempted to "reach out" to farmers with "new" technologies designed to enable them to increase production. Thus, the forestry extension efforts that followed were also often top-down efforts based on the assumption that local forest users were constrained in efficiency primarily by a lack of technical solutions directly related to forest management itself. All too often, however, the challenges related to sustainable forest development cannot be resolved by forestry alone, and a one-way narrowly focused technical approach has proved to be ineffective.
Therefore, countries are increasingly recognizing the need to reconsider the purpose and approach of forestry extension.
This issue of Unasylva focuses on the challenges facing forestry extension and current attempts to respond to them. The opening article by J. Anderson and J. Farrington sets forestry extension in context. It addresses what extension is, examines who does forestry extension and who the audiences are, and briefly sets out external and internal trends affecting forestry extension and its future.
Forestry extension (in fact, extension in general) has often been conceptualized and implemented as a conduit for a unilateral flow of information from research scientists to forest managers. This approach runs grave risks of failure, as it suffers from a presumption of knowing, without asking, what the needs of local resource users are and how to address them. T. Enters and J. Hagmann analyse the relationship between research and extension, based on experiences in northern Thailand and Zimbabwe.
A broadening of the objectives of forest management has resulted in a parallel expansion of the target groups for forestry extension. This can and does result in forestry extension being required by and provided to two groups of resource users with conflicting interests in a single area or even a single forest. P.H. May and M. Pastuk describe two recent experiences in forestry extension that have accommodated diverse local perceptions and interests in a single municipality in eastern Amazonia, Brazil.
Once assumed to be a "man's world", it is now apparent that women have an important, if not dominant, role in natural resource conservation. M. Kane describes the experiences of the Balochistan, Pakistan component of the FAO Interregional Project for Participatory Upland Conservation and Development in involving women in natural resource management.
J.B. Nikiema, Chief of the Animation-Communication-Training component of the FAO-assisted Natural Forest Management Project in Burkina Faso provides an exposition of unexpected interpretations by local people of extension drawings. This brief article poignantly evidences the need to focus on tools and techniques of communication as well as on the message in extension.
A successful example of the process of extension education is provided by C.R. McKinley, J.R. Sidebottom and J.H. Owen, who detail the work of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service and other agencies in assisting growers and consumers of speciality trees (for Christmas holiday use), an important sustainable forest industry in the United States.
Also included in this issue are three articles indirectly related to the main theme: S.K. Datta and M. Ray consider the evolution of forestry training in India; S.A. Dembner and J. Anderson discuss the changing needs and opportunities for forestry information dissemination and communication; and D. Henderson and L. Krahl consider the potential benefits of adopting the principles of community forestry in the management of federal forests in the United States.
Comprehensively, the articles presented in this issue of Unasylva argue strongly that forestry extension will need to continue to adapt and evolve in the future. Two important issues will continue to require special attention. First, it will be essential to develop and maintain the necessary complementarities between forestry extension and other rural development-related extension approaches and messages. Second, the potential represented by the rapid development and increased accessibility of information and communication technologies should be tapped to the fullest. In the final analysis, successful extension will depend on proactive horizontal networking; open, participatory, transparent attitudes; and a better accountability of extension workers to their "target" groups.
