In the last three decades, with the increasing threat of environmental degradation and indigenous calls for involvement in the governance of natural resources, decentralization policies have been implemented globally in the hope that the participation of rural communities and governments will help improve the conservation of those resources. It is partly under this assumption that, in recent years, an increasing number of local council forests are being created in Cameroon's forest regions. Using semi-structured interviews of national, regional and local actors and key informants, empirical observations in eastern Cameroon as well as documentary evidence, this paper analyzes municipal forest governance in the Dimako Council Forest, the oldest of its kind managed by local elected officials in Central Africa. According to the empirical results, the Dimako experience had veered off course as local authorities appeared to have bypassed the restrictions imposed by the management plan. Furthermore, the data show that timber harvesting proceeded without any planning as well as throughout the entire forest in search of high value species. Finally, the council reforestation efforts had all but fallen short of expectations. Essentially, a clear and enforceable framework is needed from national policy-makers to reverse the trend in Dimako.

Since the mid-1980s, throughout the world, decentralized experiments in natural resources management are being promoted under the major assumption that through the inclusion of those who were formerly excluded -rural communities and governments -the management of those resources as well as local and rural living conditions will be improved. In Cameroon, following the 1994 landmark Forest Law which transferred significant powers, resources and responsibilities to local actors, three primary modes of involving local communities and rural governments in the forestry sector were created: community forests; the annual forestry fee (AFF) and (local) council forests. While the literature has focused on the governance of community forests and the AFF, the study of council forests has lagged behind until recently. This paper investigates the impact of the forest management decentralization on rural livelihoods in the local council of Dimako, the first local government to benefit from this particular type of transfer of powers in Central Africa. Overall, the empirical data reveals that the whole experiment has turned awry as the benefits have essentially bypassed local villagers amidst stories of incomplete projects, overestimations and alleged misappropriation of funds by the local mayor.

The paradigmatic ascent of the new public management (NPM) doctrine in the 1980s was a joyful moment for advocates of market‐led public sector reforms. Four decades later, following disappointing results, the NPM is no longer dominant. Pending the emergence of a new leading paradigm, however, NPM‐inspired reforms are still being pursued in several nations worldwide. The central African nation of Gabon is one of those. For 8 years, it pursued an unsuccessful program of agencification of the state apparatus reportedly to create a “modern” public bureaucracy that would support economic modernization. This article provides the first scholarly analysis of the effects of this program. It shows that agencification fundamentally undermined the fragile foundations of the Gabonese administrative state. The magnitude of the damage to the state apparatus stands as the key finding of this study. This outcome further strengthens the case against an uncritical adoption of exogenously‐developed public sector reforms.

In recent years, alongside implementation of “traditional” decentralization policies, sectoral decentralization experiments in natural resources management have taken place worldwide, mainly under the justification of improving resource conservation and rural development. In the Congo basin, for instance, the epicentre of Africa's tropical rainforests, Cameroon has been engaged in these dual processes of devolution of power to municipalities and municipal involvement in the forestry sector. Drawing on the case of the first municipal forest governance experiment in Cameroon, the article argues that the lack of co‐ordination between the political and sectoral decentralizations is undermining the foundation for effective, democratic and accountable municipal and environmental governance. The case provides useful policy recommendations for donors supporting the global emergence of municipal government capacity.