Performance of participatory forest management in Ethiopia: institutional arrangement versus local practices

Abstract

The field of community-based natural resource management has been receiving growing scientific attention over the past two decades. Most studies, however, focus on investigating institutional designs and outcomes and pay scant attention to how community-based natural resource management arrangements are carried out in practice. Through an in-depth ethnographic case study in one of the pioneer participatory forest management (PFM) arrangements in southwest Ethiopia, this article demonstrates a significant disparity between the PFM institutional principles and actual local forest management practices. Our study confirms the usefulness of a practice-based approach to understand and explain how a newly introduced institutional arrangement is acted upon by local actors situated in their social, political and historical context. Our findings also contribute to empirical knowledge useful to instigate dialog and to critically reflect on whether and what kind of intervention is actually needed to positively influence forest management practices on the ground.

Keywords:

• community forest management
• PFM arrangement
• design principle
• institutions
• local practice
• practice-based approach

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The case study was conducted in Agama village, which is administratively located in Gimbo woreda (district) of the Kaffa zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region (SNNPR) in Ethiopia.

2. Bonga forest is not a continuous forest block or cohesive woodland; rather, it is a non-figurative umbrella term encompassing the mosaic of primary forests covering the hills around Bonga town over a radius of about 40 km, including Agama forest (Stellmacher 2007).

3. PFM document reads: ‘The principle behind PFM is that people will conserve forests if they own rights to the resource, if they gain more benefit by retaining the forest than by removing it, and if that benefit is linked directly to the existence of the forest’ (Bradstock et al. 2007, 27).

4. Actors in this study refer to individuals, social groups or organizations that have a stake in the use and management of forest resources.

5. See Vandenabeele (2012, 62–68) for a detailed account of the connection between the murder case, the eviction of the villagers and the historically rooted state intervention in forest management.

6. The Kambata people migrated to Agama from the most eastern tip of the SNNPR and they speak Kambatigna (Cushitic language family). When Kaffa and Kambata people communicate, they practically always use Amharic, the lingua franca of Ethiopia.

7. Members as identified by Farm-Africa were households living around and in the forest (Farm-Africa 2004).

8. There is a distinct social distance between Kaffa and Manja; for example, the two groups do not eat together, and intermarriage is traditionally unthinkable (Yihenew 2002).

9. Bushasha zone is one of the four sub-villages of Agama, the three others being Gokesha, Kidah and Kama.

10. Some personnel worked part-time for Farm-Africa and part-time for the government, reflecting the overlapping position and stake between the two external actors.

11. Ethiopian names are not based on family or surnames and, thus, Ethiopian authors appear under their first name following the practice and logic of names in Ethiopia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP) – NUFFIC.

Notes on contributors

Alemayehu N. Ayana

Alemayehu N. Ayana is a researcher in forest and environmental governance in the Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute, Ethiopia. His research agenda focuses on the interaction of institutional, socioeconomic, and ecological factors that influence forest conditions and forest-community relationships. He (co)produced a number of academic publications on the subject of forest and environmental governance and management of Agroforestry landscape.

Nathalie Vandenabeele

Nathalie Vandenabeele obtained an MSc in Bio-Engineering in the Erasmus study program at the University of Ghent, Belgium and University of Wageningen, The Netherlands, specializing in forest and nature conservation policy. Her research for this concerned community forest management in Ethiopia and her dissertation was entitled: ‘A case study of local practices of a Participatory Forest Management project in Ethiopia: self-formation between principle and practice.’

Bas Arts

Bas Arts is a professor in the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group at Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands. Currently, his professional focus is on: new modes of governance in environmental politics (mainly with regard to forests, biodiversity and climate change) and the role of private regulation and the power of nongovernmental actors in environmental politics. He has (co)produced over one hundred academic publications, including papers, book chapters, edited volumes, and research reports.