Du bénévolat en forêt : l’exemple anglais

In the area of the New Forest at the end of the 1990s, the Forestry Commission developed a volunteer programme that enabled the general public to take an active part in the management of this natural environment and in creating awareness amongst visitors. Once this programme had been fine-tuned over a period of ten years, the ONF at Fontainebleau conducted a survey in 2009 of the system for managing volunteer work in forests used by its British counterpart, with a view to assessing the feasibility of implementing this type of programme in French forests. This article describes the management methods used to recruit, train, and assign tasks to volunteers, as well the relationships established by the Forestry Commission with people who want to contribute to its work on a volunteer basis. This study provides feedback from an experience that is very far removed from usual French practices and raises a number of legal issues that need to be resolved before determining whether the British example can be applied in France.