Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

Annex 3: 20
negotiate for trees they are interested in burning. The charcoal burner will arrange for a chainsaw
operator to come in and fell the trees. In yam farms, the charcoal burner will wait for the end of
the yam harvest before burning charcoal. At Njau and Tanoso an arrangement has been worked
out whereby a fire volunteer from the other settlement (that is to say, a fire volunteer from Tanoso
in Njau, and vice-versa) will inspect the trees which charcoal burners intend to exploit and certify
that they are dead wood. Gradually more transparent structures and institutions for negotiation are
coming into being within a situation of simmering conflicts.
At Nsawkaw some charcoal burners estimated that they pay the traditional authorities ¢60,000 per
annum for rights to exploit charcoal. In addition they pay farmers from ¢200,000-¢2 million for
rights to exploit dead farm trees depending on the potential value of charcoal exploitation from the
farm. They pay the District a levy of ¢1,000 on every bag of charcoal produced and the Traditional
Council ¢100 on every bag of charcoal processed. Negotiating bodies are evolving from the
community level, and from an implicit understanding of the value of charcoal, rather than from the
higher echelons. These latter (the District Assembly Environmental Committees and the regional
and national structures of environmental management) are still rooted in grand narratives of
impeding crisis narratives and environmental destruction by rural producers.
Networks of farmers and charcoal burners would have been better served by structures which
would have facilitated negotiation in the first place. However, these options were not open to
farmers whose rights to charcoal production were not originally recognised. Through these various
strategic machinations and intrigues farmers have been able to gain rights to sell trees on their
farms to charcoal producers. These struggles have ultimately targeted chiefs as much as they have
charcoal burners. Once farmers win rights to sell trees they can become accommodating. However,
some chiefs may also respond by becoming vindictive, as perhaps is the case at Weila, pursuing
environmental management as a way of continuing a struggle with the youth over control over
charcoal revenues.
Given the high value of charcoal resources to the transition zone district assemblies, it is surprising
that they have not evolved structures to promote more sustainable production of charcoal. The
extent of the charcoal resources within the transition zone districts remains largely unknown, as