Developing Incentives and Institutions for Protecting the Eastern Rainforests of Madagascar
These families are among a rapidly growing, country-wide labour force that is 90 per cent agrarian, the vast majority of whom rely on subsistence farming for survival. Living in one of the poorest countries in the world, with an estimated per capita income of US$190, they have few feasible alternatives to exploiting the forests and forest resources. Slash and burn agricultural techniques practised in Madagascar generate low yields which decline quickly from year to year, making it necessary for farmers to move to new fields. From the country's independence from France in 1960 until about 1985, anti-deforestation laws were virtually ignored. Though enforcement has since increased, the current complex of laws affecting forestry (colonial, Malagasy, constitutional and traditional) are often conflicting and unclear. Thus policy is variously interpreted by different jurisdictions and enforcement entities. The general land-tenure rule in the eastern rainforest region, however, is that the person who first clears and cultivates a piece of land gains exclusive agricultural rights to it. Because a household cannot secure rights to land without clearing it, the land-tenure regime encourages the match-box holder to strike and light! The resources being lost due to these practices are enormous (though generally valued against a very different set of measures than the Malagasy farmer uses). The rain and cloud forests of eastern Madagascar have some of the highest species endemism in the world, and are among the most endangered vegetation types in this biologically unique island country. Perhaps most notable to the international conservation community is the forests' habitat value for numerous species of lemur, which exist nowhere else. Of considerable national economic as well as environmental importance, these forests are isolated remnants of a much larger primary forest system estimated to have been 65-70 per cent destroyed by human activity. The Malagasy Government realised in the mid-1980s that intervention was needed to limit the rampant destruction. The shifting cultivator needed alternatives (coupled with meaningful sanctions) and the national economy needed better ways to derive value from the remaining rainforest in order to maintain its many useful but under-valued functions. A concentrated government effort to create a conservation-related sustainable development system resulted in a National Conservation Strategy in 1984, a Forest Policy in 1985 (currently under revision) and a National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) in 1989. The fifteen-year NEAP is supported by a co-ordinated international community of donors. The conservation of an expanded system of protected areas is a central element of the plan. To help generate alternatives for the nation's exceptional forest heritage, the Malagasy Government has invested in a system of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs). These are "laboratories" for building institutions that can integrate the goals and practices of forest protection with the use and conservation of natural resources for sustainable development. ICDPs focus both on improving professional management capacity for protected areas, and on generating alternative livelihood opportunities for residents of designated "peripheral zones" whose activities threaten the protected forest. A central challenge in the ICDP effort has been expanding local community authority and capacity for natural resource management while addressing needs for enforcement of existing protected area and forest regulations. Gaps in Madagascar between legality and practice, and between "customary law" that is embedded in local social codes known as Dina that have legitimacy with local people, and official law which often does not, are notable. Helping to understand and bridge these gaps has served as a strategic intervention strategy for CIFOR's action research in Madagascar on Protected and Peripheral Area Management Systems. Until recently the country's general devolution policy, codified in the 1992 Constitution, was vague about natural resources management. In October 1996, the Local Community Management of Renewable Natural Resources Act was adopted by the Malagasy legislature. It provided an important new legal basis for localities to assume responsibility and share in the benefits of governing and managing their natural resources. CIFOR's research helped to shape the new law, and is presently helping to find a process for its implementation for protected forest environments. A focus of CIFOR's effort is to help negotiate community-based forest management agreements through a process of "Resource Use Negotiation" with interactions between researchers and key stakeholders, and then participatory evaluation of the processes and outcomes by the persons affected. The method is being applied in the ICDPs associated with the Ranomafana National Park, established in 1991, and the proposed Masoala National Park, both designated to protect unique and essentially intact tracts of eastern rainforest. The effort is helping to elaborate principles, guidelines and procedures for negotiating forest protection and sustainable use agreements among stakeholders. The process originates from community perspectives on livelihood, tenure and governance issues that affect local people's behaviour towards protected forests. Studies in strategically selected buffer zone communities have shown how people depend on protected forest resources for their security and well-being, how various complementary and competing rules of access affect the use of these resources, and the roles of communities in deciding how and by whom resources may be exploited, including sanctions for offenders. Information is generated with communities through participatory methods. The studies reveal how the standing forest can become more valuable to communities if they are allowed to make non-degrading use of the protected forest, whereas exclusion and prohibition strip the forest of all value other than a one-time fertiliser application to rice fields. In Ranomafana NTFPs have been the basis for negotiating resource use and management agreements among communities. In Masoala where the timber value of forest resources is much higher than in Ranomafana, this is the negotiable resource of principal interest to communities. A timber-based community management agreement is being negotiated, based on certification of the wood resources by Woodmark for export to "green markets" in Europe. These activities are only part of the ICDP strategies to preserve the Ranomafana and Masoala rainforests. Intensification of lowland rice systems, the development of more permanent tree-management systems in the upland areas, and improved returns from tourism are also being pursued to create alternative livelihood options. As relationships between park protection agents and communities improve due to these developments, devolved forest management agreements should become part of the local institutions and culture. CIFOR's partners in this consortium include the Department of Environmental Law and Management of the University of Fianarantsoa (Jean Rakotoarison), and the Departments of Forestry (Bruno Ramamonjisoa) and Agro-Management (Maminiaina Razafindrabe) in the Graduate School of Agronomy at the University of Antananarivo, their research assistants and students. The research is led by Louise Buck and locally co-ordinated by Lalaina Rakotoson, an environmental lawyer who specialises in protected area issues. The inter-disciplinary research team collaborates with the national agency for protected area management (ANGAP) and the national Forest Department. The operators of the respective ICDPs are also research partners, State University of New York - Stoney Brook and Cornell University in Ranomafana, CARE and the Wildlife Conservation Society in Masoala. This research is financially and logistically supported by USAID. Louise Buck |