Community forestry is very much the fashion in forest policy and discourse. The majority of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America now have policies that refer to community ownership or user rights, and arrangements for co-management. The experiences of some of these countries—India and Nepal in particular—have been analyzed in immense detail, and with a strong focus on social and institutional aspects. This volume does something few others have done: it focuses on the experiences of one country, in the round. Chapters contribute analyses of history and policy, social processes, ecology and land use change, and economics. It is the outcome of a project comprising a series of studies of these aspects in Mexico, and hence has a natural integrity resulting from the contributors' mutual purpose and history of working together.

The multifaceted analysis, and the ways in which the Mexican experience is set in the global context in the introductory and concluding chapters, are the strengths of this book. The Mexican situation is in many ways unique. It has its roots in the land reforms of the early 20th century, resulting in a situation where 80% of the forests are owned by communities. Mexico's particular achievement is in the commercial production of timber within the context of community forestry, through community forest enterprises (CFEs), which form a focus of many chapters. This is an area skirted around cautiously by governments and development agencies in other countries. Too often, community forestry is synonymous with the desire to achieve reforestation on the cheap, or to pacify rural disquiet. By contrast, the authors term this commercial success “community forestry in the strong sense.”

The book is a solid tour of the issues. Authorship ranges from academic to NGO, and with good representation from Mexican writers. The dry style of parts bears further examination: there is good coverage of the political background and the introductory analysis is astute—it is not enough to demonstrate current financial success but, in addition, evidence is needed of ecological sustainability.

A very welcome section addresses the neglected question of the impact of community forestry on forest ecology, although I would have liked to see more on the connection between this and community management. While it is acknowledged that communities are not experts in all aspects of forestry, sustainability relies on good use of rigorous monitoring by the managers themselves—in this case the community. As these chapters make clear, not enough is known about how the valued species regenerate, even by scientists. If community forestry is to be sustainable, it must be adaptive—and that requires that the managers (in this case, the communities) understand and respond to changes in their forests. The need for such expertise is documented in a case study of the ejidos in Quintana Roo, where communities were faced with economic crisis unless they improved their inventory methods (Lawrence and Sánchez 1996). Without such procedures, it is not clear that “community forestry in the strong sense” equates to sustainability in the strong (ie ecological) sense.

For the political economist and historian, there is a mass of fascinating detail, covering a range of scales and time periods. Forest owners and users have organized and reorganized; matters are not as straightforward as the simple model of ejido ownership and management would indicate. For example, Rodolfo López-Arzola describes the exploitation and protest of the Oaxaca indigenous communities, followed by their unionization and the business lessons learnt, particularly through the 1980s. Peter Wilshusen focuses on the state of Quintana Roo and the very recent changes within the ejidos themselves, as distrust and financial incentives led to subdivision into work groups. The approach of the book is more social than cultural; description in detail does not often include the voices of the community members or an understanding of how they might make sense of their experiences. One of the most important comments in the book is by Peter Taylor, noting that “successful” CFEs are so, probably, because the economic unit (the cooperative, or ejido) overlaps with the social unit, and therefore members have a strong incentive and context in which to make their relationships work.

If the book is strong on the Mexican situation, it is initially a little hazy at times on the wider global context. For example, Arnold's review of community forestry (1998) is taken as a “recent” summary of the field. However, amends are made in the final section. The chapter by Klooster and Ambinakudige is outstanding as a contribution that makes sense of a sprawling literature on community forestry around the world. The book ends on a strong note, with David Bray's chapter pulling together the story that emerges from previous chapters, and summarizing the lessons from Mexico. Clearly, community forestry can be economically viable, and policies can help to make that happen. To some extent, this experience must be dependent on ecological and social context—which species are in the forest, and how people interact with each other. The experience of Mexican CFEs is encouraging, and similar studies elsewhere are now greatly needed to understand the extent to which that experience is replicable or applicable elsewhere.