Challenges to Improving Governance in Participatory Forest Management

Abstract

Failure to embrace equity and good governance practices has dogged forest management in the tropics for a long time. The most cited reason for the failure is the licensing of forest products, which in turn determines community access rights to forest products. Communities "participate" through watching timber logs being carted away by lorries for processing in far away centres. The poorest households, women and other marginalised groups, often bear the greatest burden in relative terms. As a result, communities have developed a very negative attitude towards forest management to a point of not participating in putting out a forest fire if not being the arsonists themselves. With the introduction of Participatory Forest Management in Kenya in the late I990s, stakeholders in forest management are witnessing development of Community Forest Associations (CFAs). The CFAs are viewed as vehicles for inculcating equity and good governance in forest management Preliminary field surveys of selected CFAs using Rapid Rural Appraisal tools, reveal that some groups are facing the same equity and governance problems which were earlier observed in the management of the forestry sector before the emergence of PFM. The source of these problems are: weak CFAs composed of members of one clan even though the CFA cuts across several villages which have several clans. The other key challenge is elitism where retired and those retrenched from public and private employment through structural adjustment programmes hold key positions in the local CFAs where one family held all the leadership positions: chairman (the father), treasurer (daughter-in-law) and secretary (the son).