AnalysisInsiders, outsiders, and the role of local enforcement in forest management: An example from Tanzania
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.
References (51)
- et al.
Planning for people and wildlife: design dilemmas
World Dev.
(1992) Stability and outcomes of common property institutions in forestry: evidence from the Terai region of Nepal
Ecol. Econ.
(2001)- et al.
Optimal enforcement of property rights on developing country forests subject to illegal logging
Resour. Energy Econ.
(1993) - et al.
Local enforcement and better forests
World Dev.
(2005) - et al.
Government management of village commons: comparing two forest policies
J. Environ. Econ. Manag.
(1999) Factors influencing people's participation in forest management in India
Ecol. Econ.
(2000)- et al.
Enforcement, payments, and development projects near protected areas: how the market setting determines what works where
Resour. Energy Econ.
(2004) Importance, cause and effect of bushmeat hunting in the Udzungwa Mountains, Tanzania: implications for community based wildlife management
Biol. Conserv.
(2006)- et al.
Community managed forests and forest protected areas: an assessment of their conservation effectiveness across the tropics
For. Ecol. Manag.
(2012) - et al.
The impact of buffer zone size and management on illegal extraction, park protection, and enforcement
Ecol. Econ.
(2013)
The trees and the bees: using enforcement and income projects to protect forests and rural livelihoods through spatial joint production
Forthcoming in Agricultural and Resource Economics Review. December, 2011
Villagers as forest managers and governments ‘learning to let go’: the case of Duru-Haitemba & Mgori Forests in Tanzania
Forest Participation Series No. 9. IIED, London
Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There a Role for Rural Communities?
Crime and punishment: an economic approach
J. Polit. Econ.
Institutional analysis of evolution of joint forest management in India: a new institutional economics approach
For. Policy Econ.
Beekeeping and Sustainable Livelihoods
Bees and Their Role in Forest Livelihoods: A Guide to the Services Provided by Bees and the Sustainable Harvesting, Processing, and Marketing of their Products
Effectiveness of parks in protecting tropical biodiversity
Sci.
Forest commons and local enforcement
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A.
Cost-effective conservation: a review of what works to preserve biodiversity
Parks and people: livelihood issues in national park management in Thailand and Madagascar
Dev. Chang.
Deforestation and CO2 emissions in coastal Tanzania from 1990 to 2007
Environ. Conserv.
Forest Conservation and the Rural Poor: A Call to Broaden the Conservation Agenda
Environmental and socio-economic baseline study — Tanzania
Norad Evaluation Department, Study 4/2009
Integrating Conservation and Development Experience: A Review and Bibliography of the ICDP Literature
Cited by (6)
The endogenous formation of common pool resource coalitions
2023, Journal of Economic Behavior and OrganizationMeasuring the forest and income impacts of forest user group participation under Malawi's Forest Co-management Program
2015, Ecological EconomicsCitation Excerpt :In some settings, governments jointly manage forests, although Behera (2009) finds that, in India, joint management with NGOs was more effective than joint management with the forest department. In related recent work from Tanzania, Robinson et al. (2014) argue that effective management might require some legalization of extraction by local communities in return for their cooperation in enforcing rules against outsiders and non-locals. Considering the threat to forests, the Government of Malawi has implemented a number of instruments to devolve forest management.
Illicit activity and scarce natural resources in the supply chain: A literature review, framework, and research agenda
2023, Journal of Business LogisticsStrategies for managing common pool natural resources in Sub-Saharan Africa: A review of past experience and future challenges
2019, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy