Well-performing community-based forestry (CBF) has the potential to rapidly restore forests in ecological terms and scale up sustainable forest management to the national level, while improving local livelihoods of billions of the most marginalized people around the world. The purpose of this framework is to facilitate assessment of the extent of CBF, the status with regards to the enabling conditions, and the impact of CBF on forests and local livelihoods at the country level. Thus, this assessment framework can serve to provide important insights into the successes, as well as the continued shortcomings of CBF at the country level.