Participatory Forest Management and the Future of Forestry Industry in Tanzania

1.0 Meaning of Participatory Forest Management (PFM)

Participatory Forest Management (PFM) is a strategy to achieve sustainable forest management by encouraging the management or co-management of forest and woodland resources by the communities living closest to the resources. It is one of the many forms of the more general Community-Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) which has dominated conservation thinking in Sub-Saharan Africa for the last twenty years.

The Tanzanian Government defines PFM as:

“The arrangements for management that are negotiated by multiple stakeholders and are based on set of rights and privileges recognized by the government and widely accepted by resource users; and the process for sharing power among stakeholders to make decisions and exercise control over resource use.”

Participatory Forest Management is characterized by forest-adjacent communities sharing power rather than just benefits, and assuming owner/user rights and management of the resources. PFM can contribute to a broader rural development strategy which aims to improve rural livelihoods and by reducing poverty whilst at the same time protecting the environment and promoting gender-equality.

2.0 History of Forest Policy & Management in Tanzania

The first National Forest Policy of Tanzania was established in 1953 and reviewed in 1963. The aim of this policy was to conserve the forests in perpetuity for the present and future generations. However, the policy placed all the powers with foresters and ignored the people. This was not inappropriate at that time as the population was small and pressure on forests was minimal.

Over the years pressure on forest resources has increased as a they are called upon to meet demands for fuel wood, fodder, building poles, timber, agricultural lands etc. This is partially attributable simply to an expanding population, but also widespread poverty and low level of education hinder adoption of new, alternative technologies.

In response to the social, economic, environmental, cultural and political changes taking place in the society and nation at large, the Government of Tanzania formulated a new national forest policy in 1998. It provides room for people’s involvement in conservation, e.g. policy statement 39:

"Local communities will be encouraged to participate in forest activities. Clearly defined forest land and tree tenure rights will be instituted for local communities, including both men and women. "

Enabling legislation for the new policy was passed with the new Forest Act of 2002. Efforts to involve the people in forest conservation in Tanzania date back to the early 1990s. They were mainly donor funded and at the time were not explicitly supported by existing policy or legislation. Following success in various pilot areas and policy changes within the MNRT, a new national level programme of PFM has been established. All 5 regions under the Catchment Forests Project (Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Morogoro, Tanga and Manyara) have started PFM in at least one Forest Reserve in each district. Also 12 districts in 4 regions of Iringa, Lindi, Mbeya and Morogoro are implementing PFM project under the support of DANIDA.

Tanzania is one of the leading countries in Africa implementing PFM-style practices. Since 1995 more than five hundred Village Land Forest Reserves (VLFRs) have been declared by communities out of communal lands. In addition, several thousand households, clans or other community groups in Shinyanga Region have demarcated private forests (called Ngitiri). Together these developments have brought more than half a million hectares under community protection.

3.0 Types of Participatory Forest Management in Tanzania

In Tanzania, PFM implementation is split into two categories:-

3.1 Joint Forest Management (JFM) is applicable where there is a pre-existing local or central government forest reserve. In this instance the forest adjacent communities enter into a Joint Management Agreement with the appropriate reservation authority to share management responsibility and benefits accruing.

3.2 Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) is used to refer to cases where there is no pre-existing forest reserve which must be taken into account. Here communities simply decide to reserve a part of their village lands as a VFA. Upon provision of an acceptable Village Forest Management Plan (VFMP) control and ownership of all the forest resources therein is devolved to the village government.

4.0 Impact and Spread of Participatory Forest Management (PFM)

Spread and adoption of PFM to date

A number of rather ad hoc surveys were carried out during the late 1990s and early 2000s to attempt to establish the overall adoption of PFM across mainland Tanzania. Many of these surveys were incomplete and had substantial gaps in data. In 2006, a fresh attempt was made by FBD to obtain a more complete assessment of how PFM had spread by soliciting data from a range of sources: from NGOs and donor funded projects, from District Councils known to be active in PFM and from central government records and reports.

4.1 The impact of PFM impact on livelihoods and poverty reduction

In addition to improving the overall management of forests in Tanzania, a key policy objective of PFM is to improve the livelihoods and wellbeing of poor rural communities who live close to, or inside forests and woodland areas. Unfortunately, the availability of research on linkages between PFM and livelihoods is fairly limited. In this section, the available information is presented and reviewed. Given the fact that CBFM management approaches emphasize on the full delegation of management rights, responsibilities and returns to village level institutions and below, it would be expected that CBFM would provide greatest opportunities for generating tangible and sustainable livelihood impacts.

One area that provides useful results in this regard is Iringa District, being one of the areas where CBFM models were piloted in the late 1990s, before the enactment of the Forest Act in 2002. Fourteen villages were assisted by a Danida-funded project, MEMA to reserve small to medium sized areas of miombo woodlands averaging 2,600 ha on their village land. An assessment of village forest incomes showed annual revenues of around USD 540 per year in 2002, rising to around USD 720 per year by 2005.

MNRT (2005) assessed the impact of the Hifadhi Ardhi Shinyanga (HASHI) project that worked in Shinyanga Region with the objective of restoring “ngitili”(enclosure), a traditional system of reserving pasturelands and dry season grazing areas by Wasukuma pastoralists that results in a rapid regeneration of trees. This system of land management, which is managed at individual, group and village level, resulted in the regeneration and re-establishment of large numbers of small acacia woodland patches of between 378,000 and 472,000 ha of degraded land across the region. The study showed further that the total monthly value of benefits from the re-establishment of ngitili per person was USD 11.7, a figure higher than the average consumption per person of USD 7.1 per month in the rural areas of Tanzania at that time. In addition to cash returns from the sale of ngitili products (grazing rights, firewood and poles), ngitili restoration has considerably reduced effort for collecting various forest products in all districts of the region. Significant gains in reduced effort have been made in the collection of fuel wood, thatch grass, poles, fodder and water. The monetary value per household per day for the reduced effort in collecting various ngitili products was found to be USD 0.7 for firewood collection, USD 0.5 for collecting poles, USD 0.8 for collecting fodder, USD 0.55 for thatch materials collection, USD 0.3 for collecting withies, USD 0.3 and USD 0.34 for domestic and livestock use of water respectively. The study further showed that the proportion of households whose economic well being at the family level had increased and improved as a consequence of values of benefits from ngitili are as high as 64%.

One factor that has contributed to minimizing the flow of benefits from CBFM to forest users is that much of the early CBFM was carried out on degraded forest land that had little merchantable timber left. Duru Haitemba and Mgori forests, some of the first forest areas placed under community stewardship were originally earmarked as NFRs and had been surveyed and even demarcated by the government. However, chronic shortage of funds coupled with rampant and unregulated use in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in the forests being heavily degraded and much of the standing timber values being lost. The low economic value of the forest areas, coupled with strong and persuasive lobbying by the Sida funded LAMP project, resulted in government agreeing to a trial process of community based management., After 11 years of community management, it is only now Duru-Haitemba forest that is being considered for low level commercial harvesting.

4.2 The impact of PFM on forest condition and disturbance

PFM is first and foremost a forest management strategy promoted by FBD and supported by a range of bilateral donors and NGOs. Behind the strategy lies an assumption that forest areas that are managed by or together with rural communities are likely to have lower levels of forest disturbance and improved forest condition than areas that are either under exclusive state management or under open access regime. Interestingly, despite the rather considerable investments in PFM both from the government of Tanzania and its development partners, there have been remarkably few studies that have attempted to independently assess the impact of PFM

under different conditions. The following section tries to draw together what is known on this subject from a range of studies undertaken in the country over the past ten years.

Data from a number of similar but separate studies undertaken by Tanzanian researchers over the past decade was compiled and consolidated in a recent study and the results are presented in this section. A total of 13 forests were sampled and showed increases in basal area and volume in sites managed under both joint and community-based forest management, and declines for both of these variables in forests under government or open access management. There were also declines in number of stems per ha in forests managed under CBFM, and increases in JFM areas and forests under exclusive state management. Although the data comes from different areas of Tanzania and different ecological conditions, they tend to suggest that forest areas managed under JFM and CBFM are recovering compared with forests managed by government alone, or under open access regimes.

Community based forest monitoring scheme introduced in 17 forest areas managed under various models of PFM in Iringa and Kilolo Districts since 2002 recorded incidences of unregulated activities such as unlicensed charcoal making and pit-sawing. Villages engaged in the joint management of the New Dabaga/Ulongambi Forest Reserve in Kilolo district documented a reduction in the frequency of traps by 50% between 2002 and 2004. In addition, encounters with wildlife were reported to occur more frequently. Although it is unlikely that populations have increased so much over so short a time, it may indicate a change in behaviour by the wildlife through a reduction in hunting effort (Topp-Jørgensen 2005.

5.0 Pre-conditions for achieving PFM impact

It is becoming increasingly clear that PFM is not a panacea, and does not perform equally under all conditions. Four key factors appear to influence the likelihood of PFM producing both economic and environmental returns. These are briefly presented below:

1.       Environmental factors

The earlier examples of PFM took place on highly degraded land (where community involvement was sought as a last resort rather than a strategy of choice) and consequently potential incentives, returns and incomes in the early stages were minimal. For many communities, faced with high levels of poverty, long term environmental rehabilitation is a cost they simply cannot afford, faced with potentially competing land uses such as small scale agriculture – or increasingly the sale of land to large scale commercial interests producing industrial crops such as sugarcane and Jatropha for bio-diesel and ethanol.

2.       Economic factors

Market forces for forest products vary enormously across Tanzania and can both drive or over-power PFM processes. Where market forces are extremely high (such as near large urban centres) it may prove impossible for villages to prevent the relentless and illegal stripping of assets by outsiders, many of them desperately poor, for charcoal and timber, thereby undermining the whole PFM process. Where markets are weak (for example due to poor roads or large distances from centres of demand) villagers may be unable to sell their produce and become disillusioned, although forests remain largely intact with abundant high value species. Where PFM areas are located adjacent to open access forest resources, illegal extraction of forest produce in non-PFM areas (and the subsequent low cost to producers) may undermine attempts by villagers to market their produce at a reasonable price.

3.        Legal factors

Central government catchment forest reserves, while providing valuable services at the national and even international level (through provision of biodiversity, water catchment and carbon functions), generate few concrete financial returns to villagers. Under current arrangements, the long term viability of many JFM agreements in catchment forests seems questionable and alternative sources of income and benefits may have to be considered.

4.       Institutional factors

Under this broad heading, one particular issue stands out most strongly, namely capacity constraints at the local government level. Under local government reforms, District Councils are increasingly taking responsibility for PFM service provision. This is being reinforced by the availability of donor funding, which is increasingly being channelled directly to local governments, rather than Forestry and Beekeeping Division at the national level. PFM appears to perform best when there is an active and engaged focal person, who has a clear vision regarding the steps required to establish PFM. Such individuals are often found in districts where former district based PFM projects operated, such as Lushoto (GTZ) and Iringa, Mufindi and Njombe (Danida). Further enabling factors are a strong interdisciplinary team, good collaboration with District Catchment Forest Officers (who fall under central government authority but operate at the district level), the availability of suitable transport and strong support from the DED and other senior staff resulting in swift processing of payments and accounts and rapid approval of bylaws and management plans. Districts which are constrained by institutional and capacity issues tend to be those which are experiencing conflicts between the focal person and other local government staff (such as the District Natural Resources Officer, or District Treasurer, District Planners or even District Executive Directors). Districts that have focused more on the implementation of CBFM appear to be making faster progress than those who have concentrated on JFM due in large part to the legal constraints that hamper formalization of the agreements and equitable sharing of revenues and benefits.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Tom Blomley and Said Iddi, (2009), Participatory Forest Management in Tanzania:   1993 – 2009; Lessons learned and experiences to date, MNRT, Dar es salaam.

GoT, (1998), National Forest Policy, Dar es salaam.

Said Iddi, (2009), Community participation in forest management in the United Republic of Tanzania, MNRT, Dar es salaam.