Stakeholders and tropical reforestation: challenges, trade-offs, and strategies in dynamic environments

Reforestation involves potential trade-offs: hard choices between environmental and social benefits, individual and community benefits, and among stakeholders who bear different costs and benefits. In this manuscript, we aim to show that successful long-term reforestation requires stakeholder engagement beyond planning stages and a recognition of the dynamism of stakeholder outlooks as stakeholders’ opportunities, relationships, interests, and roles change over time. We first summarize lessons from recent literature on stakeholder involvement within reforestation efforts. We then present findings from a multiple-stakeholder workshop organized in west-central Mexico, in which we illustrate their choices on how to navigate trade-offs among different reforestation intervention strategies (agroforestry/silvopastoral, natural regeneration, native species reforestation, commercial plantations). We confirm that individual stakeholders’ circumstances, interests, and roles, as well as the contextual factors shaping them, are dynamic, continually changing the nature of the choices stakeholders face. Finally, we propose a four-phase pathway for addressing dynamic trade-offs and synergies in stakeholder participation in order to select, implement, and sustain successful reforestation activities. The pathway comprises four phases: (1) collaborate to devise a reforestation strategy through dialogue about dynamic trade-offs; (2) pledge robust stakeholder commitments to mutual arrangements for implementing reforestation; (3) implement reforestation interventions; and (4) adjust strategy through continuous evaluation of outcomes. We then elucidate how components of these four phases can be operationalized so that, on one side, scientists and practitioners might better understand the dynamic trade-offs reforestation poses for stakeholders, and on the other, stakeholders might balance their hard choices in ways that promote forest recovery.