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legal system within the district struggles with issues of corruption and elite controlwhere there has often been suspicion of one part paying of a judge to rule in his/herfavour. The lack of management by the Village Council in distributing and controllingland has resulted in a more de facto open access land use, and due to the huge influxof people in the area there is now an increasing competition over land, leaving manypeople in need of acquiring an income in other ways. This competition over land andneed for an alternative income is not as big in Nyali and Lunenzi as there is still landavailable for cultivation and the population pressure is not as big, however also hereforest is cleared in order to acquire more land for cultivation and to some extentextraction of forest products is also done in order to get addition income.7.4.2 Informal institutions, rules and valuesAccess to forests is also highly regulated by institutions, but more so than formal onesby informal rules and norms. Because even though the Forest Act dictates eachvillage is supposed to follow national and district by-laws as well as village by-lawsthe forests within our villages are to a high degree regulated only by informal rulesand regulation. In Masugu they have more or less open access to all land, and whereasthey were free to take agricultural land wherever it was available so are they able toextract forest products more or less as they please. The lack of a functioningmanagement system has resulted in a highly degraded forest base and although muchof the bad management lies in the inability and lack of knowledge within the VillageGovernment on what their responsibilities are, we also see two additional importantcontributing factors, namely the the great heterogeneity of the village and the greatdegree to which people come and go in the village. For as Scoones (1998) points out,the presence of a sense of “unity” consisting of shared norms and values are of criticalimportance in understanding livelihoods and their sustainability.For instance just within our sample we recorded 17 different ethnic groups and noneof which was in clear majority. In addition, 22% had lived there only five or lessyears, and in total 32% less than ten years. There was also a high presence ofoutsiders in the village, meaning people who did not live there but came in to extractforest products and then left again. Its close location to Kilosa Town facilitated thismovement. As a result it seemed there was less of a social cohesion between those213