Communities and Forest Stewardship is a regional synthesis of trends in developing policy and implementing programs in forest lands. The study is based on the experiences of the AFN working with forest-based communities in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. It focuses on some of the changes that have taken place in the forest sector between the early 1980s and 2005. As such, it chronicles some of the early legislative, policy, and programmatic actions that have been taken to devolve authority and enable community forest management and the prospects they offer for future change.