Local Forest Management

The Impacts of Devolution Policies

David Stuart Edmunds, Eva Karoline Wollenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136562105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

'A well written book, astutely organized.'
Development and Change

Local Forest Management is built around careful and illuminating case studies of the effects of devolution policies on the management of forests in several Asian countries. The studies demonstrate that devolution policies - contrary to the claims of governments - actually increased governmental control over the management of local resources and did so at lower cost.
The controversial findings show that if local forest users are to exercise genuine control over forest management, they must be better represented in the processes of forming, implementing and evaluating devolution policies. In addition, the guiding principle for policy discussions should be to create sustainable livelihoods for local resource users, especially the poorest among them, rather than reducing the cost of government forest administration.
This book is essential reading for forest and other natural resource managers, policy makers, development economists and forestry professionals and researchers.

1

Introduction

David Edmunds, Eva Wollenberg, Antonio P Contreras,
Liu Dachang, Govind Kelkar, Dev Nathan,
Madhu Sarin and Neera M Singh

During the 1980s, a confluence of political pressures began to force or encourage central governments to devolve natural resource management to local individuals and institutions located within and outside of the government:¹

• Overextended government bureaucracies began to look for ways to cut costs.
• Environmentalists painted images of sustainable resource management based on an intimate economic and cultural connection between local people and natural resources, as well as images of more effective resource protection by those living in close proximity to natural resources.
• The poor and their advocates hoped that local control would help them to protect local livelihoods and capture a greater share of the other benefits of natural resource management.
• Development specialists demonstrated the feasibility of working with local communities, and an ideological movement was developed that supported more small-scale, bottom-up and locally responsive measures based on local people's self-determination, in contrast to development strategies focused on large, imposed infrastructural investments.
• Political reformers argued that direct public involvement in resource management and greater public oversight of (more accessible) local officials were ends in themselves, and that such decentralization improved civic culture.

These forces have encouraged one of the most dramatic transformations in natural resource management in modern history. There are now devolution policies for natural resources in virtually every corner of the globe. Policy reforms have sought to transfer authority for managing water resources to local institutions in more than 25 countries (Vermillion, 1997). Rights over wildlife have been devolved in Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and rights over rangelands have been devolved to local management associations in Lesotho (Shackleton et al, 2002). Central governments have also taken steps to transfer authority for managing fisheries, soils, protected areas and other resources to local institutions.

Perhaps the most far-reaching and well-documented devolution policies, however, have been in forest management (Fisher, 1999; D'Silva and Nagnath, 2002, Lynch and Talbot, 1995, Poffenberger, 1990). Colonial regimes in Asia and Africa, in particular, centralized the management of forests to control the valuable resources found there (Guha, 2001) and, sometimes, the people who might be hiding among them (Sioh, 1998). Independent governments also began centralizing the management of forests during the 20th and early 21st centuries. Centralized state control continued throughout most of the 21st century.

However, governments found it increasingly difficult to exercise their authority effectively.² The world's remaining forests were remote, their resources diverse, and their interactions with people and other resources increasingly complex. Popular protest at the shortcomings of centralized policies, such as the rubber tappers’ ‘empate’ movement in Acre and the chipko andolan forest protection movement in India, also forced government officials in some countries to re-evaluate their position on who should be responsible for forest management.

Though the policies take different forms, the shift in forest management authority from central government has occurred around the globe. There are now policies to devolve forest management to municipalities in Bolivia (Kaimowitz et al, 2003), district councils in Zimbabwe (Mandondo, 2000; Nemarundwe, 2001) and Tanzania (Massawe, 2001; Wiley, 1997), and other forms of local government in Indonesia (Wollenberg and Kartodihardjo, 2002; Dermawan and Resosudarmo, 2002) and the Philippines (Magno, 2001). In India (Saxena, 1997), Nepal (Kafle, 2001; Shrestha and Britt, 1997; Malla, 2001) and the US and Canada (Poffenberger, 1995), central governments have granted authority for forest management to local non-governmental and community-based organizations. In China, individual households have benefited from devolution policies, exercising management rights once reserved for government or party-dominated collectives (Liu, 2001).

The shift in authority for forest management is formalized in a variety of ways, including:

• corporate legal organizations, composed of rights holders – for example, rubber tappers’ organizations (Brazil), ejidos (Mexico), trusts (Botswana), conservancies (Namibia) and communal property associations (Makuleke, South Africa);
• village committees facilitated by government departments – for example, Village Natural Resource Management Committees in Malawi and Forest Protection Committees in India;
• contractual agreements between the government and households or individuals (the Philippines, China);
• local government organizations, such as rural district councils in Zimbabwe and panchayats in India, and multi-stakeholder district structures aligned to line departments, such as tambon councils in Thailand and wildlife management authorities in Zambia.

Some state programmes have also allocated rights and responsibilities directly to households or individuals, such as in China and the Philippines, where individuals exercise varying degrees of authority over species selection, harvesting practices, sale and consumption, and the distribution of benefits.

Many of these arrangements parallel those for other natural resources. In fact, local organizations created under devolution policies are often responsible for managing multiple resources – for example, district councils in Zimbabwe are involved in wildlife management, and local governments are responsible for protected areas in the Philippines. Because the motivations and formal arrangements for forest devolution are similar to those for other natural resources, we suggest that the lessons learned from forestry may be broadly applicable to the devolution of other natural resources.

Among the most important lessons, we believe, are those concerning the impact of devolution policies on the lives of the rural poor. A broadly held expectation – indeed, a key rationale for devolution policies – has been that devolution would bring the large numbers of rural poor who live in and near forests better access to forests and more self-determination in decisions about local resources. The results have been mixed and difficult to discern. Some observers suggest that, although devolution policies fail to deliver on many of our hopes, they are a better alternative than centralized management (Chiong-Javier, 1996; Corbridge and Jewitt, 1997; Joshi, 1999; Saigal, 2000; Lynch and Talbot, 1995; Marco and Nunez, 1996). In a sense, some participation is better than none. Most governments and donors, encouraged by such analysis, have continued their efforts to devolve forest management away from central forest departments.

However, experience with specific policies suggests a need to pause and reflect about the nuances of devolution's impacts. Indeed, forest cover has increased in many places (Saxena, 1997; Liu, 2001). Policies have encouraged legitimate community tenure rights to forests (Lynch, 1999) and have helped to promote participatory decision-making in forest management (Johnson, 1999; Guha, 2001). Yet, in many cases, devolution appears to be transferring little or no authority to local forest users and is having, at best, no significant positive impact on the livelihoods of the poor. Local institutions set up under devolution have often been accountable to forest departments and other government offices, rather than to local people (Ribot, 1998; Malla; 2001; Mandondo, 2000), with the possibilities for genuine co-management being quite limited (Baland and Platteau, 1996) despite efforts to empower local communities under these arrangements (Borrini-Feyerabend, 2000). Devolution has not proportionately benefited women, ethnic minorities or the very poor; any gains in income have been relatively small for most people, and often overshadowed by negative trade-offs in resource access and control (Upreti, 2001; Sarin, 1998). Pre-existing local institutions have been undermined by their lack of legal standing (Lindsay, 1998) and clear property rights (Grin-spoon, 2001; Agrawal and Ostrom, 2001) relative to institutions that are newly created or sponsored by governments.

To better understand the nuances of these impacts of devolution on the poor, we decided that a study of devolution's impacts was needed from a new perspective. Although a number of studies have documented the mixed impacts of devolution on local people's livelihoods and political power in specific sites (Poffenberger, 1995; Sarin, 1998; Khare et al, 2000; Sundar, 2000a; Gauld, 2000; Malla, 2001), a smaller number have tried to assess these impacts for a large number of diverse sites in different country settings (Baland and Platteau, 1996; Shackleton and Campbell, 2001; Ribot, 2001; Mayers and Bass, 1999; Gibson et al, 2000; Enters et al, 2000; Agrawal and Ribot, 2000; Agrawal and Ostrom, 2001). These studies represent important contributions to the comparative study of devolution policies in natural resource management. To varying degrees, they focus on the suitability of different institutional arrangements for collective action (Gibson et al, 2000; Agrawal and Ostrom, 2001), the possibilities for local participation in decision-making within the formal governmental decision-making structure (Ribot, 2001; Agrawal and Ribot, 2000), or the effect of devolution on government objectives for forest production and protection (Mayers and Bass, 1999). While these are important areas of analysis, we believe most take for granted both the ‘public goods’ interest of the state in forests and the legitimacy of government-sponsored devolution arrangements. We have tried, instead, to focus on local political and livelihood interests – especially of women, ethnic minorities and the very poor – and to consider alternatives to the formal arrangements for devolution that were put in place by governments. From this analytical starting point, we treat rights of local disadvantaged groups as primary, arguing for policy reforms that protect these local rights, while making incremental gains in protecting the public interest, rather than the reverse.

In other words, rather than assess how communities can be instruments for achieving state forest management objectives, we assessed if devolution policies could be a means of promoting rural people's self-determination and economic advancement in forest management, or what we called ‘space for local forest management’. We looked at this space in terms of the extent to which local people, especially disadvantaged groups, exercise control over:

• changes in the extent and quality of forest;
• their economic assets and livelihood strategies; and
• decision-making processes related to forest management.

We purposefully use the term control to distinguish our work from models of public participation that solicit input to decisions controlled by forest agencies (see Daniels and Walker, 1999, and Rossi, 1997, for discussions of various forms of public participation). Control implies that local people make decisions about forest management themselves, or those who do are accountable to them (Ribot, 1998). We suggest that there may be a need to apply such a framework to better understand the impacts of devolution not only for forest management, but for other natural resources as well.

In taking this perspective, we seek to promote democratic decision opportunities for people who depend on natural resources with ‘public good’ qualities, such as forests, water and wildlife. Strong arguments exist for recognizing the benefits of these resources to those outside the local community. Watershed management, biodiversity conservation and carbon storage, for example, have effects well beyond the community level (Enters and Anderson, 1998). Yet, historically, many natural resources have so frequently been treated as the domain of the ‘public interest’ that the fundamental rights of the people living in, or using, them have been overlooked or traded in the name of the greater social good. Even where the rhetoric of poverty alleviation exists, such objectives have been framed in terms of meeting national objectives related to economic development, not in terms of protecting an individual's or community's right to economic self-determination. People living in forest areas, in particular, have been expected to cope with sometimes drastic limitations on their choices and to yield rights of self-determination commonly enjoyed by others living outside of forests (Sundar, 2000b; Scott, 1998; Peluso, 1992; Hecht and Cockburn, 1989; McCarthy, 2000a; Klooster, 2000). Forests and many other natural resources clearly require a multi-stakeholder approach to management; but there has been a lack of ‘space’ for the poorest users to influence management decisions (Wollenberg et al, 2001). Opening up this space is now the key challenge for natural resource policy.

Our research was not intended to represent the whole story of forest devolution's impacts on local people. Instead, we have tried to elaborate on the issues that have not received adequate attention in assessments and that we felt should be brought into discussions about forest policy reform. To highlight these issues, we focused on the three countries with the longest experience with devolution and its large-scale implementation across diverse contexts. In sharing the lessons from these countries, we acknowledge that considerable progress has been made in some places for some local people; here, we focus intentionally on where further progress can be made to foster learning for the next generation of policy development.

The remainder of this chapter outlines how we conducted our research and introduces some of our findings. Following the introduction, case study material from China, India and the Philippines is presented and analysed in Chapters 2 to 4. Chapter 5 then provides a summary of the impacts across all three countries and an analysis of the divergent interests of government and local groups to explain the inherent limitations of devolution as it is currently conceived. We end by identifying where further policy reforms are needed in Chapter 6.

Our findings indicate that devolution policies had a negative impact on the lives of local forest users in many of our case study sites. This was especially true of politically disadvantaged groups who were often unaware of the implications of policy reform or unable to affect policy implementation to protect their interests. While we intentionally looked at cases where policy implementation was likely to be a problem, the results are consistent enough, and their implications serious enough, to suggest that support for the current array of devolution policies should be reconsidered, especially in India and the Philippines. Where altern...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Boxes
• Foreword by M S Swaminathan
• Preface
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Glossary of Local Terms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Promises and Limitations of Devolution and Local Forest Management in China
• 3 Devolution as a Threat to Democratic Decision-making in Forestry? Findings from Three States in India
• 4 Creating Space for Local Forest Management: The Case of the Philippines
• 5 Whose Devolution is it Anyway? Divergent Constructs, Interests and Capacities between the Poorest Forest Users and States
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index