Mexican community forest enterprises as social firms: Organizational differences and the factors that shape them

Community forest enterprises (CFEs) are community-owned businesses that manage their forest resources for income, employment, and public goods and services. Although CFEs exist throughout the world, Mexican CFEs have been emphasized as a particularly successful model of community forestry that can deliver social, environmental, and financial benefits to forest communities. The internal organization of CFEs–the way enterprises are structured and managed to deliver benefits–plays a role in enhancing their functioning and achieving their goals. However, even in Mexico, the internal organization of CFEs remains understudied. Even fewer studies have examined the drivers that shape such internal organization and variation. We drew on social enterprise literature to examine how four CFEs in Oaxaca, Mexico are internally organized, and explored the primary factors that shape their organization. We found that the internal organization of the cases in our study varied beyond the archetypical distinctions that community forestry literature often draws among CFEs. Engaging with social enterprise literature helped us identify and document organizational differences related to CFEs' emphasis on productivity, use of paid labor, member benefits, collective nature, decision-making, and participatory nature. Such organizational differences were largely shaped by the unique histories of each of the four communities, federal policies and decisions that dissimilarly impacted communities, administrative boundaries that determined the different sizes and compositions of each community, and communities' varying internal capacities. Documenting such organizational intricacies and drivers allows for community practitioners to more transparently select–and policymakers to support–organizational features and practices best suited to a community's unique contexts and preferences when creating new CFEs or modifying existing enterprises. Additionally, drawing on social enterprise scholarship allows us to better understand different organizational features among CFEs, including potential causes and consequences, by drawing from a rich body of literature that has examined organization among social enterprises more broadly.