Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa - PROFOR

for developing these markets, miombo products offer few easy paths out of poverty. Even when
there appear to be good markets for tree products, they may be easily available, and oversupply can
depress producer prices, limiting the incentive for management.
One outcome of the development of markets for miombo tree products is domestication. While this
trend may be appropriate and desirable from a market and livelihood perspective, it has the effect
of reducing interest in the natural miombo woodland. When forest products are commercialized,
many end up being domesticated, cultivated, and subject to more intensifi ed production (Arnold
et al. 2006; Arnold and Dewees 1997; Ruiz-Perez et al. 2004). Taking woodfuel as the example,
Arnold et al. (2006) noted that the potential for increasing supplies from farmer-grown trees is
likely to continue to grow, and that changes in land tenure and labor availability, and increased
scarcity of wild resources will favor the expansion of low-input tree crops. This is very much what
has happened in higher rainfall areas, but whether it is as likely in the drier miombo woodland
areas is open to question.
An enormous amount of attention has focused on the potential for the development of markets
for environmental services (Chomitz 2007). The fact is, in the miombo region, these markets are
nearly nonexistent and are largely aspirational, except for tourism-related payment schemes. Limited
experience with these markets has shown the importance and potential for integrating these types
of schemes with more comprehensive rural development initiatives. This tends to increase their
complexity, and the costs of their development and implementation. To some extent, the priority
on catalyzing markets for environmental services becomes subordinated to the challenging themes
of local participation, benefi t sharing, and community-based management. These themes are not
incompatible, but they do represent a very specifi c market niche for highly specialized delivery
mechanisms for payments for environmental services. Carbon markets are especially problematic
because of the focus on the value of a single service. The challenge for the forestry sector more
generally (and not just in the miombo region) is to fi gure out how the range of important objectives
for putting in place sustainable forest management systems can be reconciled with priorities for
establishing and operating carbon markets.
3.4 ORGANIZATIONAL BARRIERS TO SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OF
MIOMBO
In this section we examine organizational weakness at the local and national levels.
Weak local organizations
Section 2 outlined some of the policy issues surrounding devolution. Independent of the policy
framework, at the local level, devolution requires the presence of competent and capable local
organizations. There is great diversity across the region in terms of local organizational capacity,
even within countries. So, for example, traditional authorities are strong and have legitimacy in
some parts of Zimbabwe whereas in others they are all but absent. Conversely, modern local
organizations have no legitimacy in some parts and are functioning and well respected in others.
But, to generalize across the region, local organizations are often weak, be they local community
organizations, traditional authorities, or local government. The fact that local organizations are weak
44 MANAGING THE MIOMBO WOODLANDS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA