Abstract
A large proportion of the rural population in Ethiopia depends on community-managed forests for food security and livelihoods. However, the government and development partners have paid little attention to the governance challenges which limit the contributions of community-managed forests to food security and livelihoods. Also lacking is a synthesis of evidence relating to the requirements for improved governance to support the efforts of decision makers and practitioners. This paper attempts to review and synthesize the available evidence with the aim of identifying the requirements to achieve improved governance in community-managed forests. The results revealed that failure to devise benefit-sharing mechanisms which consider the heterogeneity of rural communities was prevalent. Interference of local authorities and elite capture in decision-making processes of forest and landscape restoration also compromised the willingness of rural communities to engage in collective action. Requirements such as the identification of the needs of specific categories of communities and enabling of the negotiation of diverse interests in the design and implementation of interventions could improve the governance of community-managed forests. Developing management plans and business model scenarios which balance the ecological and socio-economic goals at a local level in collaboration with rural communities is important to improve the governance of community-managed forests. There is also a need to revisit the practice of evaluating the performance of community-managed forests almost exclusively based on the goals of climate change adaptation and mitigation and biodiversity conservation.
Highlights
Accepted: 25 January 2022Several approaches have been employed for realizing sustainable governance of community-managed forests across Africa, including decentralized forest management, collaborative forest management, community-based forest management and joint forest management [1,2]
Participatory approaches might differ with respect to the attention given to ownership, rights, and responsibilities, yet they have commonalities in their attention to the need for enabling local level forest governance
The terms used to search for literature separately and in combination included: ‘communal forests’, ‘community forests’, ‘community-managed forests’, ‘exclosures’, ‘church forests’, ‘community woodlots’, ‘dryland forests’, ‘hillsides’, ‘land restoration’, ‘forest rehabilitation’, ‘PFM’, ‘governance’, ‘forest management’, ‘participation’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘decision-making processes’, ‘ownership’, ‘accountability’, ‘representation’, ‘transparency’, ‘equity’, ‘gender equity’, ‘marginalized groups’, ‘women’, ‘youth’, ‘performance’, ‘rural livelihoods’, and ‘forest dependence’
Summary
Several approaches have been employed for realizing sustainable governance of community-managed forests across Africa, including decentralized forest management, collaborative forest management, community-based forest management and joint forest management [1,2]. The local communities participate in a general assembly to approve the identified priority areas, assign a leadership committee and guards, and develop village bylaws for defining forest use and user groups, mobilizing collective action for the maintenance and protection of the exclosures, and benefit-sharing mechanisms [51]. Community-managed forests in Ethiopia exhibit governance constraints caused by internal factors that are context-specific, such as power relations and lack of trust among users [35,57], and an inability to achieve local needs [58,59] External factors, such as government policies and the prevalent use of top-down approaches in decision-making processes, have limited the effectiveness of interventions on community-managed forests [48,60]. The last section presents the conclusions, along with recommendations for policy and practices
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