Good governance of local forest is neither easy nor cheap: Policy learning from Bimbia-Bonadikombo

Abstract

This paper interrogates good governance of the Bimbia-Bonadikombo community forest (BBCF) Cameroon by the Bimbia-Bonadikombo Natural Resources Management Committee. While governance processes are essential for sustainability of forest resources, they also reveal the transaction costs associated with managing the resource. The paper is based on a longitudinal ethnographic case study of the BBCF carried first between 2005 and 2006, and later between 2019 and 2020. The paper finds that the BBCF is neither governed by provisions of the Cameroon community forestry manual nor by its own Constitution, but by the personalized governance style of its board president, who was accountable to no one in the institution; secondly, an inability to generate enough revenue to meet its operational cost, led to corruption among its forest patrol team. The paper thus shows that the transaction cost of governing the BBCF was greater than its resource capacity. The paper recommends the setting up of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal accountability mechanisms to incentivize good forest governance at the local level. The paper also recommends for a permanent financial subsidy from the global donor community to local forest groups managing community forests in Cameroon. This could be considered as a transfer payment from developed countries to local people in developing countries to maintain their forests as a global ecological good without losing their local access to essential forest products. The paper concludes with a call to forest governance policy makers to not equate local with ahistorical, simple, cheap, and easy because the local is embedded in history and political culture. As donors and governments invests heavily in initiatives like forest landscape restoration, which depends on long-term support of local communities to achieve its goals, this lesson on how to incentivize good forest governance at the local level is of vital importance.