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Challenges for Community-Based Forest Management in the KoloAla Site Manompana

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Abstract

Following the IUCN 5th World Congress on Protected Areas in 2003, the then-President of Madagascar decided to increase the area of Madagascar’s protected areas from 1.7 to 6 million ha. To combine the aims of protection and timber production, a new concept was developed through the establishment of community-based forest management (CBFM) sites, called KoloAla. However, experience shows that similar management transfers to communities in Madagascar have only been successful in a very few cases. We aimed to explore the success to be expected of this new approach in the particular case of the Manompana corridor at Madagascar’s eastern coast. In a first step, the readiness of the corridor’s resource users for CBFM has been analysed according to the seven resource users’ attributes developed by Ostrom that predict an effective self-organized resource management. In a second step, we explored how KoloAla addresses known challenges of Madagascar’s CBFM. Analyses lead in a rather sober conclusion. Although KoloAla attempts to address the goals of poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and timber production under a single umbrella, it does so in a rather non-innovative way. Challenges with regard to the state’s environmental governance, agricultural inefficiency and thus deforestation remain unsolved.

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Notes

  1. Mananara Nord is a commune situated on the east coast of Madagascar, north of Manompana.

  2. Centre de coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the organizations that have helped fund our research: The Research Fellow Partnership Program (RFPP) of the North-South Center at the ETH Zurich, the Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE), and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Furthermore, we thank AIM (Association Intercooperation Madagascar); the KoloAla Manompana team and especially the local households who made this research possible by freely sharing their lives and information with us; Erin Gleeson for fundamental comments and English proof-reading, and the reviewers for important and valuable inputs and recommendations.

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  1. ETH Zurich-USYS, Zurich, Switzerland

    Zora Lea Urech & Jean-Pierre Sorg

  2. ETH Zurich, NADEL, Zurich, Switzerland

    Hans Rudolph Felber

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  1. Zora Lea Urech
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Correspondence to Zora Lea Urech.

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Urech, Z.L., Sorg, JP. & Felber, H.R. Challenges for Community-Based Forest Management in the KoloAla Site Manompana. Environmental Management 51, 602–615 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-012-0011-7

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