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The Quest for Sustainable and Decentralized Forest Governance in Eastern Cameroon: The Dimako Council Forest Case Examined

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Abstract

In the last three decades, with the increasing threat of environmental degradation and indigenous calls for involvement in the governance of natural resources, decentralization policies have been implemented globally in the hope that the participation of rural communities and governments will help improve the conservation of those resources. It is partly under this assumption that, in recent years, an increasing number of local council forests are being created in Cameroon’s forest regions. Using semi-structured interviews of national, regional and local actors and key informants, empirical observations in eastern Cameroon as well as documentary evidence, this paper analyzes municipal forest governance in the Dimako Council Forest, the oldest of its kind managed by local elected officials in Central Africa. According to the empirical results, the Dimako experience had veered off course as local authorities appeared to have bypassed the restrictions imposed by the management plan. Furthermore, the data show that timber harvesting proceeded without any planning as well as throughout the entire forest in search of high value species. Finally, the council reforestation efforts had all but fallen short of expectations. Essentially, a clear and enforceable framework is needed from national policy-makers to reverse the trend in Dimako.

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Notes

  1. Ribot (1998) characterized decentralization as the formal transfer of powers and responsibilities, sometimes with financial resources, from the central state to sub-national organizations or actors, whether at the regional or local levels. According to Meynen and Doornbos (2004), three strands of thought drove natural resources management decentralizations: neo-liberal public choice advocates concerned with efficiency, market deregulation, and privatization; the ‘good governance’ agenda, still neo-liberal but with an accent on accountability and transparency; and finally, populist advocates who favour community-based approaches.

  2. Cameroon’s 1994 Forest Law defines a council forest as “any forest that has been subject to a gazetting act for the said local council or that has been planted by that local council” (RoC 1994 Art 30, 1).

  3. Cameroon’s forests are divided into the non-permanent, known as the agroforestry zone, and the permanent forest estates. In theory, council forests are all supposed to be located in the permanent forest estate.

  4. In the case of council forests, municipal forest governance primarily involves two sides: forest and revenue management. On the forest side, municipal forest governance seeks to go beyond traditional forest management through reliance on sustainable forest harvesting practices and the involvement of various stakeholders, such as rural populations, in monitoring forest operations. Municipal forest governance practices specifically refer to logging, conservation and all other efforts which, at least on paper, seek to ensure the sustainability of council forests. Finally, municipal forest governance in Cameroon includes more than just council forests; it also includes the anticipated ‘municipal’ forest reserves—not covered here.

  5. In major metropolitan centres including Yaoundé and Douala (the primary centre of economic activity), the position and powers of mayor are held by a power-wielding central government-appointed civil servant known locally as the Délégué du Gouvernement or Government Delegate.

  6. In Cameroon, management plans are revised every five years. Thus, in theory, the 2006 plan was revised in 2011. However, it is unclear whether this took place.

  7. The modes of operation in council forests are: the self-management regime, the Sales of Standing Volume (SSV), the harvesting permit and the private authorization to log. Of those four modes of operation, only the self-management regime and the SSV, which involves a local council ceding the rights of harvest to a third-party against the payment of royalties, are the most lucrative for local councils.

  8. Karsenty et al. (2006, 132) observed that, despite their distinctiveness, the rotation and the felling (harvesting) cycle are used interchangeably in Cameroon.

  9. In Cameroon, beginning in 1994, the old logging concessions have been replaced by what is known in French as the Unités Forestières d’Exploitation or FEU. An FEU is usually divided into multiple Assiettes Annuelles de Coupe (AACs). Theoretically, this means that one FEU cannot be harvested in a single year.

  10. According to one Cameroonian forest administration official, while harvesting two AACs concurrently in the same ‘concession’ is legally forbidden, loggers are allowed to harvest a single AAC two years in a row, as in 2007 and 2008 in Table 1.

  11. In the reforestation efforts, there were in fact two main plantations: en layons and en bandes alternées (cluster planting). Because at the time of data collection, tree planting had just been completed in the plantation en bandes alternées, that plantation is not discussed here. Furthermore, both plantations were to be distinguished from another plantation inside the FCD. The latter, a mixed plantation of moabi and oil-palm trees, was supposedly designed as a commercial venture.

  12. As of April 2010, the FCD revenues were officially apportioned according to a revenues sharing formula adopted by the municipal council in August 2003. That formula allocated forest revenues as follows: 50 % for improvement of rural welfare and the local economy; 30 % for the council government operating costs; 10 % each for reforesting the council forest and for direct in-cash handouts to local villagers.

  13. Indeed, Dimako local authorities did not implement legal provisions of the management plan in part because they had valid annual logging permits issued by the forest administration. Needless to say that a number of those permits would not have been issued if the prescriptions of the management plan, the fruit of years of scientific research from API-Dimako and Forêts et Terroirs as mentioned above, had been strictly followed.

  14. The program aims through the creation of a nationwide network of council forests to improve the management of the country’s forest resources as well as rural livelihoods. The program relies on the Technical Centre on Forest Communes (CTFC) to implement its activities.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Louis Picard, Martin Staniland and Harvey White from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), University of Pittsburgh as well as Michael Echemendia from the National Intelligence University, US Central Command for their comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this paper. I am also beholden to Samuel Assembé-Mvondo from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Yaoundé for commenting this manuscript while in the draft stage. I am grateful to the Centre Technique de la Forêt Communale (CTFC) Director Baudelaire Kemajou and former East Region section head Adolphe Ondoua for providing logistical assistance while conducting this research. I am also indebted to the people of Dimako for making this study possible. Finally, I thank Steve Harrison as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments, suggestions, and improvements to this paper. I am responsible for all final errors and omissions.

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    Gyldas Ofoulhast-Othamot

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Tree species found in the FCD (all diameters)
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Table 5 Main provisions of the FCD management plans
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Ofoulhast-Othamot, G. The Quest for Sustainable and Decentralized Forest Governance in Eastern Cameroon: The Dimako Council Forest Case Examined. Small-scale Forestry 14, 363–379 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-015-9293-y

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