Social and Economical Aspects of Miombo Woodland Management in Southern Africa: Options and Opportunities for ResearchPeter A. Dewees |
| [Back to
OccPaper Top Page] [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7] [Chapter 8] |
Institutional change, tenure, and access to woodland resourcesConcern about miombo woodland management is partly rooted in the growing perception of the importance of these areas to rural households and communities. Because of their high degree of dependence on miombo areas, there is an increasingly widespread view that their long term conservation and management can only be assured if communities are brought more actively into the management process, and if rights of use and access are assured through legislative and policy reform. Easier said than done. Land tenure over wooded areas may be held by the state, which has a particularly strong interest in maintaining its long term rights to state lands such as national parks and reserves. It may be held by commercial farmers or by an estate sector with little interest in woodland management or conservation and who see any discussion about devolution of control over woodland areas as a threat to expropriate their land. Local councils usually have responsibility for the administration of customary lands, and have the right to allocate land for agriculture. In the face of growing land pressures, councils see little incentive to maintain land under wooded cover. If we speak purely from the perspective of tenure over land, there are indeed considerable institutional obstacles to devolving control over woodland areas to local communities. If we speak instead of tenure over trees (the right to harvest, use, or sell woodland products) the dimensions of the argument are only slightly altered. The state typically has had the most dealings with timber and wildlife interests in terms of assigning the right to use woodland products from state lands to institutions other than itself. While there are sometimes arrangements made which allow people living in peripheral areas around state lands to engage in the nondestructive extraction of woodland resources, it is far less common to find these arrangements so extensive as to allow commercial exploitation. Similarly, large scale commercial farmers more commonly seek to exclude anyone who represents a threat to their long term rights as landowners and see the collection of woodland products from their land as `poaching'. Finally, councils often retain rights to revenues from woodland exploitation on customary lands, even if trees are found growing on land which has been allocated to a household. Much forest legislation in southern Africa greatly restricts the rights of households to benefit from woodland management for anything other than for subsistence use. [1] In some instances, the state (rather than local councils) has maintained that it has the rights to revenues from any trees growing on any land. This has resulted in the creation of large and expensive bureaucracies devoted to licensing, revenue collection, and regulation. Resource constraints prevent these bureaucracies from operating effectively. Even if they were able effectively to do their job, it would drive the market underground, and reduce any interests which communities might have in long-term sustainable woodland management. Where a national forestry institution has regulatory responsibilities as well as responsibilities for rural forestry extension, obvious conflicts are likely to arise. It has been widely argued that, at the local level, customary controls over woodlands have the greatest potential for being the most effective. In some areas, this is most certainly the case. Wilson (1990), McGregor (1991), Scoones and Wilson (1989), Fortmann and Nhira (1992), Coote et al. (1993a, 1993b) and others have documented extensive examples of where customary controls have been effective at limiting woodland damage and at conserving and managing miombo areas. Still, these examples also show how difficult it is to implement these types of control systems in situations where customary authorities are weak, where they are in conflict with other communities or with new local institutions, or where long term patterns of settlement have been disrupted by in-migrants and new settlement. The new rhetoric of participation, which argues for a devolution of natural resource management responsibility to the local level, presupposes community controls can be effective in the first place. Even so, there are few examples where devolution has had such a straightforward impact. In southern Africa, the greatest experience with these types of initiatives has been in the implementation of wildlife or livestock management programs. There are very few examples where government has sought unambiguously to devolve control over a woodland area to a community in southern Africa with the objective of improving its management. Even fewer studies have sought to evaluate the benefits to households and communities of doing so [2]. This is partly because there is such a large range of potential benefits and beneficiaries, and because there are few clear mechanisms for control and accountability over revenues from woodland management. The clearest conflicts over the right to use woodland resources have arisen when different user groups have placed claims on woodlands or on the land on which they are found. The most obvious conflicts are found between governments and the people living in, or adjacent to, state-owned woodlands. They are also found between long-term residents and more recent settlers, between households in customary lands and local councils, and between residents of different communities dependent on the same resource. `Resource sharing' is the term which is increasingly being used to describe the resolution of these conflicts by developing management strategies where all user groups can benefit. Resource sharing and state lands Forest reserves and national parks are almost universally places here local people attempt to exercise rights of use, despite the state's statutory claim to the land and the trees. Throughout southern Africa, the situation is no different. State forests are often surrounded by heavily settled areas, and conflicts usually arise between the state and local people who have encroached into the woodlands for a variety of reasons, such as for hunting, the unlicensed grazing of cattle, wood collection, and the clearance of trees for cultivation. Arrangements which allowed certain users temporary rights of tenure to these woodlands have created longer term problems for subsequent generations. Forest departments, in the best of all possible worlds, would like to retain their exclusive right to use their land as they see fit, while people from surrounding areas would like to see woodlands cleared to allow settlement. There are really two types of conflicts which need separate (but not mutually exclusive) responses. The first has to do with the problem of settlement on state lands, while the second has to do with the use of resources within state lands by people living on their periphery. A failure to identify effective solutions which are specific to these two types of conflicts (and indeed, which are far more specific to the conditions of tenure, settlement, and land-use which characterize each particular conflict) has posed significant problems for national forest departments. Forced evictions and the criminalization of people who use resources collected from state lands has characterized the response of the state to many of these conflicts. In many respects, these confrontational approaches have increased local political support for the redistribution of state lands. Governments have found themselves in an increasingly defensive position over the assertion of their statutory right to use and manage their own lands. The articulation of a cogent set of objectives for the use of state lands, in a way which reflects broader economic and policy considerations, has been problematic, and governments refuse to abandon their exclusionary focus on the protection of woodland areas as watersheds and as natural habitats. There is little question that any significant shift from this view will entail possibly high costs for national forestry institutions. Resource sharing and customary lands Much discussion about the breakdown of customary systems of resource management accepts the assumption that common property management systems are being increasingly replaced by open access exploitation, which is followed by a deterioration in the resource base. This section focuses on the potential for common property systems of woodland management in customary lands. At the crux of the issue is the question of how and by whom rights of control and access are defined. Strengthened systems of common property management depend on communities holding greater control over woodland resources. There are real constraints to giving communities or individuals control over the management of woodland resources. These constraints are firmly rooted in legislation, land usage rules, and other practices and policies. Much legislation is fundamentally restrictive, rather than enabling. While legislation may recognize the rights of people living in customary lands to use woodland products, they are usually not allowed to use products which someone else has been licensed to exploit, to use `reserved' trees except by license or permit, or to sell anything collected from woodland areas. These types of restrictions were basically designed to strengthen the rights of concessionaires to commercial timber species, and of local councils to revenues from them. Strategies for resource sharing in customary lands must focus on finding ways for the benefits of woodland use to be returned to the communities responsible for their management. This applies to the exploitation of commercial timber species, as well as to the range of other woodland benefits on which households are dependent. Effective common property management regimes have been characterized by,
Common property regimes sit comfortably with the idea that development should be local, democratic and participatory. Because much customary land in southern Africa is held communally (at least in theory) the idea that common property regimes can be used to manage communally-held woodlands has much appeal. This is particularly so for development practitioners for whom `participatory' development is in vogue. Are common property regimes the solution to the problem of woodland management? Not unequivocally. Far less active strategies may be more effective, particularly in areas of long-settlement (cf. Fairhead and Leach 1993a, 1993b). Experience has increasingly shown that it is usually very difficult to bring about the conditions for effective common property management. Research which has the objective of informing the policy process must necessarily take a broad view about the variables which influence patterns of woodland management. Considering local management These various dimensions of local land management emphasize the need for better information about institutional processes and how they interact to affect rights of use and access to miombo woodland areas. Finding equitable mechanisms for devolving natural resource management through processes of local institutional change should become a central feature of woodland management research. In this regard, there are five closely related areas of research (adapted from Scoones and Matose 1993):
|