Abstract

Community based forest management is one of the participatory forest management approaches practiced in Tanzania. This paper is based on the study conducted between November, 2008 and February, 2009 in selected villages of Morogoro district. It analyses the performance of community based forest management in selected villages, by considering both policy and practice. Five case study villages namely Fulwe, Kiwege, Muhungamkola, Bagilo and Tegetelo were selected. Six variables were assessed: cooperation; rule compliance; participation in decision making; rule satisfaction; credibility of monitors; and, success in rule enforcement. The study revealed that Muhungamkola and Tegetelo villages have succeeded in the management of village land forest reserves while Fulwe, Kiwege and Bagilo were found to have failed. Success observed in those two villages is attributed to a convincingly high level of peoples’ participation in rule formulation, cooperation, compliance with rules, credible monitors and a highly decreasing trend of illegal activities. The opposite accounts for the failure observed in the other three villages. The study ends with two conclusions: (1) The findings indicate that the performance of monitors differs across the villages depending on the level of commitment, enthusiasm and incentives; (2) The project approach employed in implementing CBFM activities has no far-reaching outcomes, thus is not a sustainable solution to the deforestation problem in Tanzania.

Keywords:

Community based forest management, village forest reserves,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.