View/Open - Sokoine University of Agriculture

ules and regulations in place and continue or to an increasing extent use their forestresources.Therefore, with the addition of REDD within the environmental and natural resourcessector, the legal framework within these sectors needs to incorporate this and beharmonized in order for REDD to function properly. This includes for instance thealignment of the Forest Act of 2002 with the Environmental Management Act of 2004as to remove the ambiguity of who is responsible for and when it is necessary to carryout Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic EnvironmentalAssessment (SEA). As EMA states a SEA needs to be carried out whenever newlaws, regulations, programs or plans are proposed for an area, which would then alsoinclude REDD. The Forest Act of 2002 only binds forest officers and lower-levelauthorities to make by-laws and regulations as they see fit. In addition, the Forest Actalso overlaps and contravene with the Village Land Act of 1999 and the Land UsePlanning Act of 2007 when it comes to the power of village governments to establishvillage forests, with the two latter viewed as being a simpler and more participatoryprocedure and thus should be adopted when establishing REDD (United Republic ofTanzania 2010). Likewise, given the reality of various natural resources available atthe community level, the Wildlife Policy and National Forest Policy of 1998, bothsituated within MNRT, should be aligned or at least considered as they have differentframeworks in place on how to devolve management to the village level. For instancePFM, through the Forest Policy, builds on already existing village institutions such asthe Village council or Village Natural Resource Committee and follows by-laws andland use plans set by the Local Government Act and Village Land Act. WMAs on theother hand, governed by the Wildlife Policy, requires a whole new set of communitylevel institutions, such as an elected community based organisation. Being themanager of the WMA, the CBO will then have considerable power over village landsand resources as it is responsible for giving community user rights, leaving the villagecouncil with a very limited role in the management. This divergence has beenaccounted to previously impede sectoral integration, where either a WMA or a VLFRhas been chosen and contributed to wasted opportunities and sustainable landmanagement (Blomley and Iddi 2009), and now with REDD+ being implemented itmight result in the same, either that WMAs are preferred over PFM and REDD+, or162