Bringing People Back into Protected Forests in Developing Countries: Insights from Co-Management in Malawi

Abstract

This study examines struggles to bring people back into protected forests to enhance sustainable forest management and livelihoods using insights emerging from a co-management project in Malawi. It uses mixed social science methods and a process-based conceptualization of co-management to analyze experiences, and theory of reciprocal altruism to explain major findings of continuing local forest-user commitment to co-management despite six years of conservation burdens largely for minimal financial benefits. It argues that overemphasis on cash incentives as the motivation for -self-interested‖ users to participate in co-management overlooks locally significant non-cash motivations, inflates local expectations, and creates perverse incentives that undermine socio-ecological goals. Some non-cash incentives outweighed cash-driven ones. Findings support broadening of incentives mechanisms, including via nested cross-scale institutional arrangements for holistic management that integrates adjacent forests into forest-reserve co-management. Strengthened institutions, improving community/government and intracommunity trust, improved village forests easing pressure on the reserve, measures minimizing elite capture, and impetus from an external threat, enhanced forest condition. Generous forest rights and appropriate community licensing and benefit-sharing systems also helped. Bureaucratic/donor inefficiencies, wood-extraction challenges, poor forest-based enterprise development, and low resource value undermined performance. Insights on forest-management planning, fair cost-sharing, targeting the poor, and need for social learning are highlighted.

Participants or customers in water governance? Community-public partnerships for peri-urban water supply

“…While this is fine for the board (which meets quarterly), executive members are expected to invest considerable time and effort providing ongoing quasi-professional leadership including supervision of a professional secretariat and a business-oriented enterprise. This simultaneous expectation of voluntarism among community leaders on the one hand, and high quality managerial and business-sound leadership that ensures sustained supply and social benefits, is both a major and self-defeating internal contradiction of CBNRM expectations under a neoliberal cost-recovery or livelihoods support goals setting and obstacle to meaningful and sustained community participation in resolving shared natural resources challenges, and needs to be addressed urgently (Zulu, 2013). On a business footing, investment in infrastructure should be accompanied by investing in motivated key personnel in order to enhance chances of success.…”

Forestry Policy, Conservation Activities, and Ecosystem Services in the Remote Misuku Hills of Malawi

“…The Improved Forestry Management for Sustainable Livelihoods Program (IFMSLP) was a Government of Malawi, two-phase, national capacity-building exercise aimed at improving "the livelihoods of forest dependent communities through improved sustainable collaborative management of forests both in forest reserves and customary land" [68] (LTS webpage). IFMSLP I and II were aimed at the implementation of the National Forestry Policy and Program through community mobilization, institution building, and local forest management planning [69,70]. One of the IFMSLP intervention sites included the area within and around the three public forest reserves in the Misuku Hills [6].…”

“…One of the IFMSLP intervention sites included the area within and around the three public forest reserves in the Misuku Hills [6]. IFMSLP II faced funding and implementation delays, but it was eventually pushed forward with a reduced set of strategies [70]. It was discovered through personal communications that the delays were due to suspected government corruption which caused the funding agency to halt the project, but it did eventually resume with "competitive grants for non-state actors to enhance their role in, and to accelerate, project implementation" [70] (p. 1924).…”

“…On a national level, the IFMSLP led to the development of the national 2013 Standards and Guidelines for Participatory Forestry in Malawi [70], as referenced in Section 3.1.1. The IFMSLP activities and outcomes specific to the Misuku Hills intervention site were uncovered through communications with NGOs who received the "competitive grants for non-state actors" to pick up the pieces from the mixed successes of IFMSLP I and a halted IFMSLP II.…”

Potential of institutional arrangements for sustainable management of forests under co-management with local forest organisations in Mua-Livulezi Forest Reserve, Mtakataka, Malawi

“…Figure 1 provides the linkages between the different LFOs. These LFOs receive legitimacy through the process of registration at District Forestry Office and the participatory development of the constitution and associated resource access, use and management rules at local level (Lockwood et al 2010, Zulu 2013.…”