Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 107, November 2014, Pages 242-248
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Insiders, outsiders, and the role of local enforcement in forest management: An example from Tanzania

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.08.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We develop a game theoretic model to explore forest managers' choices.

  • Our model is most pertinent to low and middle income countries.

  • We consider enforcement and livelihood projects.

  • We explicitly model both nearby “insider” villagers and “outsider” villagers.

  • We show that legalization of “insider” extraction can reduce total forest loss.

Abstract

In low-income countries, both nearby local villagers, “insiders”, and non-locals, “outsiders”, extract products from protected forests even though their actions are illegal. Forest managers typically combine enforcement and livelihood projects offered to nearby communities to reduce this illegal activity, but with limited budgets cannot deter all extraction. We develop a game theoretic model of a forest manager's decision interacting with the extraction decisions of insiders and outsiders. Our analysis suggests that, depending on the relative ecological damage caused by each group, budget-constrained forest managers may reduce total forest degradation by legalizing “insider” extraction in return for local villagers' involvement in enforcement activities against outsiders.

Introduction

During the last 30 years, the number of protected areas worldwide established to safeguard natural systems has grown dramatically. Coinciding with that expansion, many government agencies and conservation NGOs are advocating for combinations of development/livelihood policies and conservation/enforcement policies that attempt to address rural poverty and welfare while conserving forests (Naughton-Treves et al., 2005). For example, WWF's policy on forests and poverty states that “national and international forest policies and the conservation movement should address both the sustainable management of natural forests and rural poverty alleviation; one should never be addressed at the other's expense” (Gutman, 2001; p.9, para 1). The economics literature discussing policies aimed at conservation and poverty, such as Community-based Forest Management (CBFM), Joint Forest Management (JFM), and their predecessor Integrated Conservation-Development Projects (ICDPs), emphasizes their failure to create incentives for conservation by rural people (see Hughes and Flintan, 2001, for a literature review; Behera and Engel, 2006, Ghimire, 1994, Johannesen and Skonhoft, 2005, Ligon and Narain, 1999, Muller and Albers, 2004; and Shyamsundar, 1996).

Even where there is an emphasis on poverty alleviation and the provision of livelihood projects for nearby villagers who lose access to forest resources, some level of enforcement of access rules is typically needed to deter illegal extraction, whether by locals or outsiders (Clarke et al., 1993, Robinson et al., 2010). Ostrom (1990) emphasized monitoring and enforcement as key aspects of protecting forests and forest resources (Chakraborty, 2001). Increasingly management policies such as CBFM require local people's involvement in protecting the forests (Robinson and Lokina, 2012). An expanding literature finds that the involvement of local communities in monitoring and enforcing access and extraction rules tends to result in more favorable outcomes in terms of forest quality and reduced conflict. Gibson et al. (2005) highlights the debate over who should be responsible for enforcement, specifically whether governments should take on the role — as proposed by Bruner et al. (2001) and others; or local forest users — as emphasized by Stevens (1997) and Wells and Brandon (1992). Baland and Platteau (1996) stress the difficulties in protecting forests from outsiders particularly when markets develop for forest products such as wood fuels. More recently, Chhatre and Agrawal (2008) provide one of the first multi-country studies of the importance of local enforcement. The authors explore the relationship between forest regeneration and the extent of local enforcement using data that spans nine countries and find that the relationship between local enforcement and forest regeneration is complex but positive. That complexity depends in part on the extraction pressures on the particular forest, including whether people collect primarily for subsistence or commercial motives. Porter-Bolland et al. (2012) highlight the reality of many low-income countries: that most forests, even those under strict protection designations, are traditionally inhabited and managed by local people who extract various forest products. The authors suggest that in these situations forest cover is often better maintained than when these local people are excluded from the forest. Much of this literature emphasizes the actions of people located in or near protected forests. Yet many settings also face resource extraction by non-locals, which CBFM and related policies may not address adequately. For example, in West Bengal, India, forest protection committees were unable to restrict outsiders from collecting forest resources (Ravindranath and Sudha, 2004).

Our paper contributes to this expanding literature with a game-theoretic economic model of the interactions of forest manager and forest user decisions, while providing a new perspective on local-level community enforcement. The paper is motivated by Kibaha's forests in Tanzania, particularly the Ruvu North and South Forest Reserves, where forest managers struggle to protect the forests with limited budgets while facing illegal extraction pressure from both nearby villagers, “insiders”, and non-local people, “outsiders.” Insiders typically rely on the forests for fuelwood and other non-timber forest products, which is illegal given the forests' specific designation as a reserve. “Outsiders” illegally extract timber and produce charcoal, typically for sale in nearby Dar es Salaam.

In the following Section 2 we describe the particular situation in Kibaha district, Pwani Region. Motivated by a number of meetings with forest managers, patrollers, and rural villagers in Kibaha's Ruvu South forest reserve, we develop an economic modeling framework that incorporates the goals and tools of the forest reserve manager and the decisions of the two groups of resource extractors – insider village NTFP extractors and outsider charcoal producers – from those reserves, described in Section 3. Although meant to inform Kibaha's management directly, the model is sufficiently general to address a wide range of forest reserve settings with goals of forest protection and rural poverty alleviation. Section 4 concludes the paper with a discussion of the implications of our findings for including local people in forest management.

Section snippets

An Example from Tanzania: Kibaha's Forests

Despite the lack of well-established and documented mechanisms to induce conservation through poverty alleviation projects in and around parks, many parks still expect managers or NGOs to generate goodwill and achieve compliance with park regulations through a combination of enforcement activities and compensation for lost access to resources through poverty alleviation projects (Gutman, 2001, Wells and McShane, 2004). In Kibaha, we observed just such a combination of patrols and projects

Game Theoretic Model of Resource Extraction

We develop an economic model to explore some of the key issues raised by our observations in Kibaha. Our game theoretic modeling structure considers explicitly the interaction between three actor groups for a homogenous forest. First, villagers living adjacent to the forest extract NTFPs such as fuelwood, which they value at local market prices because they can sell them in a nearby market or avoid purchasing those items. Second, charcoal producers, who come from outside the nearby villages,

Discussion

Our paper is particularly relevant to situations where forest managers face different types of extraction by “insiders” and “outsiders”. To date, little academic or policy analysis provides information for managers in such settings about the best combinations of enforcement, poverty alleviation projects, and access rights. Our paper therefore makes a timely contribution, particularly as, increasingly, nearby villagers are expected to engage in protecting forests from which they have

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully appreciate funding for the fieldwork provided by the Sida-funded Environment for Development initiative, and additional funding from Formas COMMONS. Our manuscript has also benefitted considerably from the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers.

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