The government of Uganda, with help from its development partners, is designing and implementing policies and strategies to address poverty, land degradation, and declining agricultural productivity.

Institutions of collective action and systems of property rights shape how people use natural resources, and these patterns of use in turn affect the outcomes of people’s agricultural production systems.

Millions of the rural poor now participate in collaborative forest management schemes under a variety of tenurial and organizational arrangements.We examine those arrangements and ask whether local people have indeed gained more access to benefits from and control over forests.