Reorganization or Division? New Strategies of Community Forestry in Durango, Mexico

This article examines recent agrarian reforms' impact on Mexican community forestry, a common pool resource regime linking peasants' social and economic interests with conservation. It analyzes two agrarian communities that established smaller organizational units and explores peasants' creative responses to neoliberal restructuring, issues posed by new forms of governing collective resources and changing relationships between forestry and community development. Does this restructuring represent reorganization in more effective pursuit of community objectives? Or does it represent division, pursuit of individual agendas inimical to social and ecological sustainability? The counterintuitive experiences of these cases suggest local responses to restructuring may promote viable communities of producers with stakes in sustainable management or bypass such stakeholder communities. In Mexico, common pool resource regimes are best seen not as static categories of private or collective tenure, but as often ambiguous, conflictual property practices embedded in both macro- and micro-level structures.