Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa - PROFOR

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products, or other wild foods—are not uncommon, and careful mediation and conflict management is
sometimes critical to prevent the complete loss of miombo resources to fire and theft.
The legacy of poor local governance has also had profound impacts on miombo. Many government forest
reserves in the miombo region were established at a time when population pressures were low, and there
was no real need to create management systems. Simply “reserving” these areas was enough to maintain
them. But as population pressures increased, forest departments throughout the region found themselves
unable to set up effective forest management systems because miombo silviculture was either poorly
understood, it was biased toward the production of small supplies of high-value industrial wood, or
forest institutions were simply not organized to respond to new needs for management. The management
vacuum was easily filled by those best able to exploit what was perceived to be a free resource. Where
regulatory systems sought to ensure that revenues were to be collected from miombo harvests, poorly paid
and equipped local offi cials were easily able to use their positions for their own gain.
At the same time, miombo woodlands in some countries are also proving to be victims of what we call the
“myth of the commons”— the assumption that decentralization and local management and “returning”
control over woodlands to communities is the answer to all problems of management. While decentralization
of authority and resource control probably increases the possibility of greater local access to forest rents
and more local control and management, it does not guarantee this (Sunderlin et al. 2005). There is a
presupposition that earlier community controls over woodland use existed and were effective, when this
may not have been the case. Governments may give customary authorities control over natural resources
that far exceeds their capacity for management. In other cases, it may mean transferring control over
resources to a local elite, who may use woodlands principally for immediate political or economic gain.
This decidedly gloomy picture of how poverty traps play out in the miombo region also provides a clearer
understanding of how policies and institutions can be better shaped to enable miombo users to break out
of these traps. We return to this subject in section 4 of this paper.
18 MANAGING THE MIOMBO WOODLANDS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA