When community forestry meets REDD+: has REDD+ helped address implementation barriers to participatory forest management in Tanzania?

ABSTRACT

Tanzania has a progressive forest policy and legal jurisdiction for land and natural resource tenure, coupled with a strong decentralisation process that mandates village institutions with forest management responsibilities. Participatory forest management (PFM) has been a central part of government as well as a donor focus in the forest sector since the early 1990s. Numerous studies have been carried out by Tanzanian and international researchers to assess performance and synthesise experiences of PFM in recent years. The results are well documented, including the identification of a number of key bottlenecks to implementation and up-scaling. From 2009 onwards, a series of pilot projects were launched to develop and test local-level approaches to REDD+, all of which have now come to an end, and have recently been subjected to external evaluations. A central theme of many of these projects was the application of community-based approaches to forest and woodland management, building strongly on the legal framework for PFM. When REDD+ was adopted by the Tanzanian government as a new policy, feelings among civil society regarding how REDD+ might impact hard-won forest and land tenure rights were mixed. Some observers feared that REDD+ would stifle PFM and lead to a recentralisation of forest tenure by government, while others felt that REDD+ offered new opportunities for addressing long-standing bottlenecks and governance barriers to PFM implementation. Combining PFM with the specific goal of reducing forest carbon emissions has generated important lessons, some of which have the potential to strengthen the application of PFM in Tanzania and elsewhere. In some cases, we found that orienting PFM to REDD+ goals has helped address long-standing barriers to PFM implementation. In other cases, REDD+ has highlighted new weaknesses with current approaches to PFM, while elsewhere it has created problems where none existed before.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory forest management
• REDD+
• Tanzania

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Jens Friis Lund for his constructive and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper as well as the inputs of three anonymous reviewers. Tanzania Forest Conservation Group provided us with updated information on the specific inputs during village land use planning process as well as answering additional data requests. Furthermore, we thank the Norwegian Embassy for supporting this work and providing us with the opportunity to publish findings more widely.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Burgess et al., “Getting Ready for REDD.”

2. Ibid.

3. Two pilot projects, implemented by the Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania and the Tanzania Traditional Energy Development Organisation, were discontinued due to financial reporting and audit concerns. These two projects are not included in the following analysis.

4. Blomley et al., “REDD+ Hits the Ground.”

5. Phelps et al., “Does REDD+ Threaten.”

6. Beymer-Farris and Bassett, “The REDD Menace.”

7. Tanzania Forest Conservation Group, “Making REDD Work.”

8. Blomley and Iddi, “Participatory Forest Management.”

9. Odera, “Lessons Learnt.”

10. Hagen, “Lessons Learned.”

11. Balooni and Lund, “Forest Rights”; Newton et al., “Community Forest Management.”

12. United Republic of Tanzania, “Participatory Forest Management,” 19.

13. Blomley and Iddi, “Participatory Forest Management.”

14. Blomley et al., “Participatory Forest Management.”

15. Lund et al., “Promising Change.”

16. Blomley and Ramadhani, “Going to Scale.”

17. Blomley et al., “Seeing the Wood”; Persha and Blomley, “Management Decentralization”; Lund and Treue, “Are We Getting There?”; Treue et al., “Does Participatory Forest”; Lund et al., “Mixed Methods Approaches,”

18. Bowler et al., “The Evidence Base.”

19. Ngaga et al., “Participatory Forest Management.”

20. Vyamana, “Participatory Forest Management”; Balooni and Lund, “Forest Rights.”

21. Aklei and Monga, “Forest Justice in Tanzania.”

22. Morgan-Brown, “Governance and Incentive.”

23. United Republic of Tanzania, “Guidelines for Participatory.”

24. Morgan-Brown, “Governance and Incentive.”

25. “Additionality” in this context refers to evidence that any reduction in emissions from an REDD+ project is genuinely additional to reductions that would occur if that project were not in place.

26. United Nations Poverty and Environment Initiative, “Participatory Land Use.”

27. Bluwstein et al., “Austere Conservation”; Moyo et al., “Failure by Design?”

28. Igoe and Croucher, “Conservation, Commerce.”

29. Rock, “Comparative Study.”

30. Yanggen et al., “Landscape-Scale Conservation.”

31. Tanzania Forest Conservation Group, “Making REDD Work.”

32. MJUMITA, “Community Forestry Project.”

33. SCS Global Services, “Final CCBA Project.”

34. Persha et al., “More Trees.”

35. Lund, “Money Talks.”

36. Blomley and Ramadhani, “Going to Scale.”

37. Blomley et al., “Hidden Harvest.”

38. Merger et al., “A Bottom-up.”

39. Khatun et al., “When Participatory Forest.”

40. Ball and Makala, “Making REDD+ Work.”

41. Lund and Saito-Jensen, “Revisiting the Issue”; Green and Lund, “The Politics.”

42. Vyamana et al., “Participatory Forest Management.”

43. Lund and Treue, “Are We Getting There?”

44. Meshack et al., “Transaction Costs.”

45. Pfliegner and Moshi, “Is Joint Forest.”

46. Blomley et al., “Seeing the Wood.”

47. Jarrah, “ HIMA – Piloting REDD+.”

48. Khatun et al., “When Participatory Forest.”

49. Morgan-Brown, “Governance and Incentive.”

50. Blomley and Ramadhani, “Going to Scale.”

51. United Republic of Tanzania, “Guidelines for Participatory.”

52. Persha et al., “More Trees.”

53. Blomley and Iddi, “Participatory Forest Management.”

54. Ibid.

55. In the case of Kondoa, a ratio of 80:20 was agreed between communities with signed agreements and central government, while in Zanzibar, 50% of gross revenues was agreed for communities living with COFMAs, 35% to a civil society organisation representing COFMA interests and the remaining balance to tax and project developers.

56. United Republic of Tanzania, “Participatory Forest Management.”

57. Mustalahti and Lund, “Where and How.”

58. Jarrah, “HIMA – Piloting REDD+.”

59. Ball and Makala, “Making REDD+ Work.”

60. Beymer-Farris and Bassett, “The REDD Menace”

61. Sulle and Nelson, “Biofuels, Land Access.”

62. Blomley and Ramadhani, “Going to Scale.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Government of Norway. Our study is based on a commissioned evaluation and learning assignment.