Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa - PROFOR

miombo woodland management, but forestry is seldom clearly on the national decentralization
agenda. A growing body of experience with decentralization has shown that at least fi ve conditions
are important its success, and these have direct relevance for the effectiveness of efforts to engage
communities in local woodland management.
• The decentralization framework must link fi scal authority with service provision responsibilities
so that local politicians can bear the costs of their decisions and deliver on their promises.
Decentralized woodland management is one thing, but if it comes with fi scal strings attached
that compel the community to fi nance these investments on their own, it will likely fail.
• Communities must be fully informed about the costs of various service delivery options and the
resource envelope and its sources so that the decisions they make are meaningful. Managing
stakeholder expectations viz. woodland management possibilities is critical.
• The community must have a mechanism to express its preferences in a way that is binding so
that there is a credible incentive for people to participate. Locally established forest by-laws and
rules offer some scope for doing this.
• There must be a system of accountability that relies on transparent information fl ows, which
enables communities effectively to monitor what is happening with their woodlands.
• The instruments of decentralization—the legal and institutional framework, the structure of service
delivery responsibilities, and the intergovernmental fi scal system—are designed to support the
political objectives.
The idea of building stronger decentralized local organizations does not necessarily mean that
this has to be done through local “forestry” organizations. In fact, supporting and establishing
local forestry organizations may be part of the structural problem because forestry is out of the
mainstream development agenda. Rather, attention should be focused on the lowest level of
government (e.g., down to village development committees), on producer organizations, and on
civil society organizations. The challenges include enhancing the legitimacy of such organizations;
ensuring such organizations are a conduit for appropriate information to the poor; making such
organizations effective watchdogs against local elite control and corruption by petty offi cials; and
ensuring that local organizations have the capacity and resources to deal with powerful external
agents that misappropriate miombo resources. Signifi cant efforts will be needed around social
mobilization, institutional development, and capacity building to strengthen local community groups.
Enhancing forest-based markets for products and services
Attempts to develop novel products and new markets have not always been successful, while at the
other end of the spectrum, many local markets and products show low returns and limited potential
for value addition and growth (Shackleton 2007). Numerous factors, both within and outside of the
natural resource sector, constrain the development of viable and sustainable small-scale enterprises.
De facto open access resource regimes, unsustainable harvesting and management practices,
and policy environments that implicitly or explicitly disadvantage local resource management have
hindered the supply side.
On the marketing side, sometimes the context and external environment is not supportive of
market-based activities, for example infrastructure to remote communities may be inadequate
(Mutamba, technical annex 1). Severe limitations in human capacity caused by poor education and
60 MANAGING THE MIOMBO WOODLANDS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA