Detection of social forestry approaches and its impact on managing forestry plans in Golestan province

Community forestry has been introduced with a new concept in forest management with the participation of rural people as an optimal method for sustainable management of forest lands, which has forced governments and forestry officials to revise their role. In this regard, the present study was purposed to exposure social forestry approaches and its role in managing forestry plans in Golestan province.

The present study is an applied research in a survey manner. The population of the study consisted of 606 households with approximately 2250 inhabitants from six villages in three forestry plans including Loveh (East of Province), Vatana (West of Province) and Rezaian (middle of Province) forestry plans. Sampling size was determined through the Kerejcie-Morgan’s table including 241 households. In this research, sampling was done randomly and proportionally according to sampling size and proportion of each village population to total statistical population. . Data gathering was done by a researcher-made questionnaire to determine social forestry approaches through 21 individual interview and 9 group interview including natural resources experts and managers and also rural societies based on intensive grouped and mind-storm method. Respondents were asked to express their opinion on the social forestry approaches based on five-choice Likert spectrum (from very low to very high, numerically 1 to 5). In this research, determinthe validity of the questionnaire’s contents was distinguished by expert opinions from natural resources and social sciences. Reliability of the measuring instrument was also assessed by calculating the Cronbach's alpha coefficient. After collecting information, eleven questionnaires were removed due to incomplete information and 230 questionnaires were used for analysis. After collecting and categorizing data, analysis was performed using SPSS20 in the form of descriptive and presumption statistics.

Results showed that among 230 respondents household, 53.5 percent was men, 80.9 percent was married, with characteristics of 4.61 people household dimension, 43.13 year mean age, 37.9 percent with primary and without education. Also, 45.2 percent of respondents were farmer and animal keeper and 35.7 percent were workers. Results showed there was no meaningful relationship between age and number of household members of respondents with their view about the operation of social forestry approaches in forestry plans. Meanwhile, there is a negative correlation between the levels of education of respondents with their views on social forestry approaches. Rural societies believe that being as a community member and participating to Education workshop can increase the effect of social forestry approaches on managing forestry plans. On the basis of the results of this research, people participation and economical approaches were the most important (priorities 1 and 2) according to rural society’s view while servicing and educational approaches were the lowest important (priorities 5 and 6) in affecting on forest management performance.

In attention to importance and situation of social forestry approaches, it is necessary to apply participating approach for forest conservation and forestry implementation and economical approach for increasing income resources and welfare of rural society for reducing their dependency to forest. Also, educational approaches are important to enhance rural society’s knowledge to access to social forestry goals in managing forest.