International conservation and development practitioners have promoted community-managed forests as an alternative to centralized forest management for greater sustainability of forests, higher and more equitable livelihood outcomes for stakeholders, and less adversarial relationships between stakeholders and government agencies (Borrini-Feyerabend et al. 2004). A substantial body of research has demonstrated that improved environmental and livelihood outcomes have been achieved within community-managed forests (Padgee et al. 2006; Chhatre and Agrawal 2008, 2009; Bowler et al. 2010; Persha et al. 2011), at least in some contexts. However, there remains an inadequate understanding of whether these outcomes are synergistic or trade-offs, and how they...

We will conduct searches for literature to capture peer-reviewed journal articles focused on case studies in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific. This search strategy will limit its scope to studies that are published in peer-reviewed journals (see ‘Study quality criteria’, below) and in English. Two publication databases will be searched: Web of Knowledge and CAB Abstracts.

In addition to searching the aforementioned databases, we will complement search results through snowballing from reference lists of key meta-analyses and systematic reviews.

Following our review of other relevant systematic reviews and meta-analyses, we adopted many search terms used...