Against the Odds: Community forestry in the San Lucas Mountains, Colombia

• Rural communities can stop deforestation and promote forest regeneration, despite unfavourable policies and institutions. • Legitimate environmental leadership, external support and sustainable values and practices are the key to conservation. • The evidence comes from a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of eleven rural communes in northern Colombia. • Findings provide entry points for conservation efforts in areas with non-state armed groups and weak state presence. Community forestry can reduce deforestation, protect tropical biodiverse hotspots, and support the livelihoods of rural inhabitants, but only under the right conditions, e.g., well-defined property rights, enabling regulation, supportive bureaucracies, robust community institutions, and a peaceful environment in which collective action is possible. Since forest-rich regions often lack such auspicious circumstances, in this article, we ask whether community forestry may still be effective when they are missing and, if so, under what conditions. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we analysed the practices and organisational arrangements of eleven communes ( veredas ) on the western slopes of the San Lucas Mountains, in northern Colombia, characterised by a weak state presence and the chronic influence of non-state armed groups. Our findings suggest that communities can achieve low deforestation rates and promote forest regeneration when they meet three conditions: legitimate environmental leadership, support from external partners, and sustainable values and practices in relation to the natural environment. This article expands our knowledge of the conditions that make community forestry more effective in curbing deforestation and forest degradation. It provides actionable advice for civil society and local organisations that want to reduce deforestation and support vulnerable rural communities even when the ‘right’ policies and institutions are absent.