Following many years of poor forest management under central government control, countries around the world are shifting forest management to regional, local and even community authorities.
The push for decentralization has the potential to greatly benefit both forests and those who depend on them. In theory, local authorities better understand the local conditions, make decisions that reflect local needs, and give marginalized groups greater access to power and resources.
In practice, this is often the case. But not always.
CIFOR's research in Cameroon indicates decentralization has not produced the positive outcomes anticipated when, in the mid 1990s, efforts were made to improve local livelihoods by giving communities greater authority in managing their surrounding forests.
According to “Profiling Local-Level Outcomes of Environmental Decentralizations: The Case of Cameroon’s Forests in the Congo Basin”, by CIFOR’s Phil René Oyono, the country’s experiment with decentralizing forest management has often resulted in conflict within and between communities.
“What CIFOR has found during its research is that allowing forests to be managed at the local rather than central level can lead to local hostility. The research also indicates decentralizing forest management has helped create new social elites and undermined traditional authorities,” Oyono says.
Of equal concern, according to Oyono, is that as decentralization has increased so has the level of degradation in many community forests in Cameroon.
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Cameroon’s tropical forests are part of the Congo Basin, the world’s second
largest forest ecosystem after the Amazon Basin. The country’s forests have a
long history of commercial logging, dating back to the late 19th century when
Cameroon was a German colony. A German official at the time noted that “Kamerun
is the richest among our colonies: it has approximately 15-20 million hectares
of forests we could exploit easily”. Following World War I, France and Britain
managed Cameroon, with the British exporting 165,000 tons of timber between 1924
and 1928. Between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, Cameroon produced 25,034,254 m3
of timber. In the first half of 2002, Cameroon’s forests generated some US
$345,000,000 in revenue, including $42,000,000 in tax receipts for the state.
Given these financial stakes, it is unsurprising the industry has a history of
conflict - often due to local anger at being denied access to the benefits
forests can bring. Since the colonial period with its expropriation of local
communities’ customary lands by the colonial state, there has been ongoing
conflict between the state and local villagers. The state argued it owned the
forests, as evidenced in numerous forestry laws and regulations. On the other
hand, local communities, brandishing their longtime presence in these spaces,
claim traditional and historical rights over the same lands. |
Oyono studied more than 20 villages in the humid forest zone of southern Cameroon that were already allocated forestry fees from the central government and had a local committee implementing community forest management principles.
“The decentralization idea is a nice concept,” Oyono says, “But when it comes to managing natural resources, it seems to me that if decentralization is to succeed in Cameroon, it needs to be supported by democratic practices at the local level.”
But in reality, such practices rarely exist, according to Oyono.
“What is happening on the ground is often undemocratic. Corrupt individuals take advantage of the new rules and this leads to new elitist groups emerging and causes social tension,” Oyono says.
“The noble idea of giving people control over forests soon gets very messy if the process is not monitored. That may not be true everywhere, but it seems to be often the case in the large area CIFOR looked at in Cameroon.” Oyono acknowledges that decentralization has resulted in some villages successfully using their community forests and the fees gained from commercial logging to build community halls, classrooms, health centers, water wells and churches. But Oyono feels that the overall impact of the local forest management committees has been negative, and resulted in what he calls an “institutional schism”. According to Oyono's research elders and village chiefs feel their traditional authority has been undermined by newly emerged elites who have the education and skills needed to carry out the management committees’ duties.
“In many villages, misunderstandings are deep between committee members and traditional authorities. I have even heard stories of the two groups practicing witchcraft against each other,” Oyono says.
By creating new organizations for managing local forests, rather than using indigenous institutions, the architects of decentralization have created a social environment ripe for conflict. At the same time, other social groups have begun emerging - young people in particular - and claim a share in the disbursement of forestry income.
“At the local level we are seeing young people wanting to marginalize other groups", Oyono explains. In one village a group of young people overthrew the recently elected management committee, accusing it of misappropriating funds. Although the traditional elders weren’t exactly big fans of the committee, they felt it would have eventually been replaced at the next election.
The older people in the village opposed the actions of the younger group and the conflict became intergenerational. Traditional authority figures led the whole village community in rejecting the “coup” and isolated the management committee. After a long period of confrontation and disorder, the members of an earlier committee were reinstalled.
Oyono goes so far as to say “there is a significant segment of the rural population, particularly the young, who would like to see an ‘eco-apocalypse’, achieved through accelerated timber logging, because this would guarantee a large financial return within a very short period.”
To address the weaknesses of the Cameroon experiment of decentralized forest management, Oyono says a framework should be designed to monitor the hand-over process from the central government, through the regional level and down to the village level. This framework would have clear indicators and mechanisms for monitoring weaknesses such as poor local capacity, opportunistic behaviour by elite groups, inadequate collective action, corruption and the lack of local democratic functions. GC