Prioritizing enablers for effective community forestry in Cameroon

Abstract

Cameroon, in its Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries Law 94/01 of 1994, supported local communities to engage in managing forests and benefit from them economically and environmentally. Three main objectives underlie this law: (1) enabling local communities to have access rights to forests in their surroundings, (2) Improving rural livelihoods, and (3) promoting sustainable forest management. Despite a gradual increase in the number of community forests, their effectiveness in delivering on the above objectives has been low. Our aim is to examine the typologies of the enabling factors (enablers) that could improve the performance of community forests in achieving the objectives underlying their creation. Content analysis was applied to 41 documents focusing on community forest issues in Cameroon. Benefit generation, partnership, monitoring, and policy support were the most frequently mentioned enablers with 47% of the total frequency of enablers assessed. The second enablers set, with close to 33% of the total frequency, are technical support, governance, financial support, practices choices, and institutions. We found a strong degree of association between the enablers in general. Ownership, performance, and partnership dominate this with positive association with 12, 11, and 10 other enablers, respectively. These results point to two policy and technical implications in the area of community forestry in Cameroon. First, the emergence of key sets of enablers and clusters of associations can help identify and emphasize critical leveraging points for improving effectiveness and efficiency. Second, it points to the need for holistic or integrated approaches in addressing enablers to improve community forests' performance. Further research might be needed in identifying and prioritizing corresponding policy instruments required for intervention.

Community preferences for social forestry facilitation programming in Lampung, Indonesia

“…This interesting finding shows that SF indeed involves dynamic interactions between communities and external actors whereas social learning occurs to support adaptiveness (Lawrence, 2007;Lawrence et al, 2009). This finding supports the argument that facilitating 'enablers' is also a key for the sustainability of the SF program (Duguma et al, 2018). In this study, enablers could be community facilitators from NGOs and universities as well as government agencies which support communities through targeted policies.…”

“…Studies have devoted great attention to the provision of support for communities on the sustainability of Social Forestry (SF) programs (Gupta and Koontz, 2019;Duguma et al, 2018;Barsimantov, 2010). Among these studies, the government, NGOs, private sector, and other external actors support communities in various forms.…”

Deforestation and Forest Degradation as an Environmental Behavior: Unpacking Realities Shaping Community Actions

“…Once the system attributes are defined (based on the drivers aggravating D&D), it is relatively easier to identify leveraging points and the corresponding actions that may be feasible and effective [10]. Duguma et al [53], in a study assessing the factors for the success of community forests in Cameroon, identified a number of intervention areas which could act as leveraging points, e.g., benefit generation, technical support, financial support, etc. Effective forest management models could actually help minimize the extent of the key factors at the local level at least and hence motivating communities to conserve the forest.…”

Community forestry and REDD+ in Cameroon: what future?

“…As demonstrated in the preceding sections, the enhancing and inhibiting factors, as well as the enabling conditions, are vastly interdependent and connected; hence, moving toward a holistic approach to CF management is imperative (Duguma et al 2018). Approaching CF management from a multiobjective and multipurpose perspective wherein climate mitigation (REDD+) and adaptation (ecosystem-based adaptation) are addressed alongside the original livelihood and forest management objectives of CF could be highly rewarding.…”