Legal Pluralism in the Rain Forests of South-eastern Cameroon

Abstract

This chapter aims to highlight the central importance of an adequate understanding of the marked degree of legal pluralism that is typically found in societies of the hutnid forest zone of central and west Africa, for effective programmes of forest management.¹ Over the past fifteen years or so, increasingly urgent concern has been expressed in environmentalist circles regarding the need for conservation of the region’s rainforests. Central to these initiatives, and the donor aid programmes that arc associated with them, has been a debate over the most appropriate tcnurial framework for rainforest management, which has mainly been conceived in terms of three competing alternatives: 1) forests as state property; 2) forests as private property, or; 3) forests as the property of local communities. A particularly strong influence in these debates, in the context of the structural adjustment programmes to which Cameroon and many other African countries have been subject, has been the voice of the World Bank, whose neo-liberal policies have been strongly anti- state and pro-privatisation. Nonetheless, over the past several years, a faction within the World Bank that has become increasingly visible has favoured communal property rights as a solution to environmental management. In consequence, a more pluralist approach to resource tenure is emerging and being advocated by some World Bank officials, although there is still a marked aversion to state control (Burnham, 2000; see also Bassett, 1993; Goldman, 1998a and 1998b; Schrocder, 1999).