The politics of expertise in participatory forestry: a case from Tanzania

Abstract

In this paper, we show how the framing of a community-based forest management (CBFM) intervention implies the professionalization of forest management and the privileging of certain forms of knowledge in a village in Tanzania. We describe how the framing of CBFM in technical and procedural terms, and the subsequent construction of expertise by implementers through training, combine with existing signifiers of social stratification to shape struggles over participation and access to benefits from forest use and management. We also describe how the perceived necessity of expertise is not questioned by village residents, only the exclusive and anti-democratic consequences of the way it comes to be reproduced. Based on our study, we call for a careful reconsideration of the framing of participatory forestry approaches as professionalization to strike a balance between the need for expertise and the costs and potential excluding effects associated with meeting this need.