Rural communities in powerful industrial countries may face similar challenges in managing local forests to communities in developing countries. This paper reported the progress of a community in California, USA, towards strengthening their own control over local forests. Existing forest policy did not specifically favour local residents in terms of decision-making and benefits from the forest. By the time this paper was written, a proportion of state forest had been designated as one of a series of adaptive management areas to be co-managed with local residents, but recognised institutional structures to allow co-management were lacking in both the community and the Forest Service.