Application of a tri-capital community resilience framework for assessing the social-ecological system sustainability of community-based forest management in the Philippines

This study proposes and empirically tests a framework that integrates the concepts of community resilience and social-ecological system (SES) resilience through community forestry case studies. The framework provides a possible approach for assessing community resilience based on the development and allocation of socio-cultural, economic, and natural capital of individual households within a given forest community. Furthermore, aspects of SES resilience and system dynamics are used to define the potential state thresholds of community resilience. This exploratory attempt to quantify community resilience, using the proposed framework, aims to advance understanding of the conceptual overlaps of SES and community resilience as applied to forestry management. We consider community forestry groups as SES examples in which the community is an important stakeholder in managing natural forest capital. We selected pioneer communities under the community-based forest management (CBFM) Program in the Philippines as our case studies. We found that, on average, CBFM group members demonstrated moderate levels of resilience according to their acquired levels of capital. Although economic capital remained the weakest capital, the CBFM program had a positive effect in increasing the socio-cultural and natural capital of an entire community.