Community Forest Management in Southern Malawi: Solution or Part of the Problem?

We investigated performance of a committee-led community natural resources management (CNRM) model in managing common-pool eucalyptus and miombo forest resources in southern Malawi. We argue that CNRM policies that ignore internal power relations attract unintended consequences that undermine achievement of conservation and social goals. Both CNRM concept and implementation created new elites (forest committees) who largely operated as corrupt, unaccountable “village bureaucracies,” alienating communities from CNRM. Widespread forest degradation and institutional breakdown ensued. Community management became committee management, and part of the problem. Rare “success” was associated with idiosyncratic leadership qualities of village heads, suggesting need for enhancing roles and leadership skills of traditional leaders in balancing the exercise of power among CNRM stakeholders, and for broad-based community empowerment so that members can demand accountability from local leaders. Eucalyptus was perceived to have higher exchange value and to be managed better than miombo, suggesting the need for separate incentives structures and institutional arrangements.

[1]  Wil de Jong,et al.  Challenges to Proponents of Common Property Recource Systems: Despairing Voices from the Social Forests of Zimbabwe , 2001 .

[2]  R. Gauld.  Maintaining centralized control in community-based forestry: policy construction in the Philippines. , 2000 .

[3]  Margaretha Magdalena Barnard.  Science and communication : a critical analysis of the coverage by the Namibian press of the introduction of communal conservancies as a form of community based natural resource management (CBNRM) , 2004 .

[4]  P. Robbins.  Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction , 2004 .

[5]  A. Agrawal.  Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects , 2005 .

[6]  James Ferguson,et al.  The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho , 1992 .

[7]  G. Brady.  Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action , 1993 .

[8]  P Ekins,et al.  The Drama of the Commons - Ostrom, E., Dietz, T., Dolsak, N., Stern, P., Stonich, S. & Weber, E. (Eds.), National Academy Press, Washington DC (Review) , 2004 .

[9]  G. Hardin,et al.  The Tragedy of the Commons , 1968, Green Planet Blues.

[10]  D. Feeny,et al.  The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-two years later , 1990, Human ecology.

[11]  R. Bryant,et al.  Third World political ecology , 1997 .

[12]  R. Chambers.  Whose Reality Counts?: Putting the First Last , 1997 .

[13]  Harold Brookfield,et al.  Land degradation and society , 1988 .

[14]  A. Krueger.  The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society , 1974 .

[15]  Victoria M. Edwards,et al.  Collective Action in Common-Pool Resource Management : The Contribution of a Social Constructivist Perspective to Existing Theory , 1999 .

[16]  R. Bates.  SOCIAL DILEMMAS AND RATIONAL INDIVIDUALS : An assessment of the new institutionalism , 1995 .

[17]  A. Vayda,et al.  Against Political Ecology , 1999 .

[18]  M. Watts,et al.  Locating the Political in Political Ecology: An Introduction , 2003 .

[19]  Michael Watts,et al.  LIBERATION ECOLOGY : Development, sustainability, and environment in an age of market triumphalism , 2002 .

[20]  L. Zulu,et al.  From Top-down to Bottom-up: The Difficult Case of the Blantyre City Fuelwood Project , 2002 .

[21]  B. Cooke,et al.  Participation: the New Tyranny? , 2001 .

[22]  M. Leach,et al.  Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management , 1999 .

[23]  J. Ribot,et al.  Democratic decentralization of natural resources: Institutionalizing popular participation , 2002 .

[24]  M. Turner.  Conflict, Environmental Change, and Social Institutions in Dryland Africa: Limitations of the Community Resource Management Approach , 1999 .

[25]  S. Kellert,et al.  Community Natural Resource Management: Promise, Rhetoric, and Reality , 2000 .

[26]  J. Ribot.  Decentralisation, participation and accountability in Sahelian forestry: legal instruments of political-administrative control , 1998, Africa.