Abstract
This study examines struggles to bring people back into protected forests to enhance sustainable forest management and livelihoods using insights emerging from a co-management project in Malawi. It uses mixed social science methods and a process-based conceptualization of co-management to analyze experiences, and theory of reciprocal altruism to explain major findings of continuing local forest-user commitment to co-management despite six years of conservation burdens largely for minimal financial benefits. It argues that overemphasis on cash incentives as the motivation for “self-interested” users to participate in co-management overlooks locally significant non-cash motivations, inflates local expectations, and creates perverse incentives that undermine socio-ecological goals. Some non-cash incentives outweighed cash-driven ones. Findings support broadening of incentives mechanisms, including via nested cross-scale institutional arrangements for holistic management that integrates adjacent forests into forest-reserve co-management. Strengthened institutions, improving community/government and intra-community trust, improved village forests easing pressure on the reserve, measures minimizing elite capture, and impetus from an external threat, enhanced forest condition. Generous forest rights and appropriate community licensing and benefit-sharing systems also helped. Bureaucratic/donor inefficiencies, wood-extraction challenges, poor forest-based enterprise development, and low resource value undermined performance. Insights on forest-management planning, fair cost-sharing, targeting the poor, and need for social learning are highlighted.
Highlights
Three decades of forest co-management approaches have largely failed to deliver promised conservation and socio-economic benefits in many developing countries
Is cash the definitive motivation for resource users to decide to participate in forest co-management? What are implications of a singular emphasis on cash incentives? Among the insights gained from co-management experiences in Malawi, findings associated with these foundational questions emerged important in gaining a nuanced understanding of co-management given the need for and prominence accorded to cash incentives
The theory of reciprocal altruism [4,27] was useful in explaining the paradoxical finding that, despite six years of disappointingly low financial benefits for poor communities burdened with conservation costs, a high proportion of them remained committed and willing to start or continue participating in co-management
Summary
Three decades of forest co-management approaches have largely failed to deliver promised conservation and socio-economic benefits in many developing countries. The initial excitement and rhetoric have given way to a more critical consolidation phase focused on resolving theoretical and practical limitations [2,3,4,5] These participatory approaches retain strong discursive appeal, including on arguments of subsidiarity and efficiency, community empowerment, equity/inclusiveness, and productivity (ecosystem services, incomes and livelihood support), especially relative to widely failed command-and-control approaches [2,6,7]. Mounting anthropogenic pressures causing forest degradation and deforestation threaten forest ecosystem services and the livelihoods of 1.2 billion forest-dependent people globally These pressures make remaining natural forest stocks in protected forests stand out and become the (relatively) new frontier for unsustainable extraction or forest conversion to other land uses, and co-management an attractive potential solution [9,10]. Over 25% of forested land in developing countries is under some community control [11], a significant proportion in protected areas
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
