A KEY GOAL of community forestry is the long-term conservation of forest resources. Nevertheless, conservation goals must be integrated with efforts to generate a steady flow of products that meet the needs of local people. Increases in the productivity of forest lands are necessary to meet the twin objectives of conservation and rural development. The success of resource-sharing agreements between government agencies and forest users, and among forest-user groups, also depends on the existence of sufficient output. The need to provide benefits to all those involved in forest management and to ensure a reasonable return on expended labor has driven community forestry programs to search for new land-management systems. Increasingly, organizations involved in community forestry are exploring technical innovations that facilitate sustainable, multiple-use management.

The movement toward a multiple-use management strategy poses a challenge to the technical orthodoxies practiced by forest departments. For a century or more, forest departments followed principles that assumed a homogeneity of ecological and social conditions and that did not adapt to local environments. Now, the demand for sustainable increases in production benefiting communities means that management practices must be tailored to local ecological and social needs. This requires a change away from the pervasive revenue-and-timber orientation, toward strategies allowing for the production and harvest of a variety of products and environmental services from state forest land. These may include grasses for fodder and thatch, small diameter fuelwood, timber for house construction, and a whole range of nontimber forest products.

A multiple-use management strategy requires methods that increase both the productivity of forests and the diversity of forest products. Because many forest-dependent people have developed forestry practices that encourage product diversity for their own needs, one approach is to study traditional community-based forestry management models and to pursue the possibility of incorporating them into regional land-use planning. Techniques that seek to combine improved productivity, diversity, compatibility with community practices, and long-term sustainability include agroforestry, natural forest management, and the development of nontimber forest products.