View/Open - Sokoine University of Agriculture

8.3. Existing RegimesAs emphasised, the strategy towards sustainable management of community forestshave long been linked to PFM and now also to REDD. As our findings have shown,the amount of environmental income produced varies between villages as well asbetween wealth groups. This has shown us that even though villages might looksimilar on the surface, there are institutional and structural differences that havesubstantial effects on how people live their lives. By using concepts of common poolresources and resource regimes we can assess the qualities of the differentmanagement systems and capture their relative effectiveness and efficiency.However, while a comparison between our three pilot villages will tell us a lot,perhaps even more interesting would be to compare them to a village which havealready gone through PFM and been managed as such for a while. By doing this wewill be able to see how a PFM management system affects environmental income.As we can see in Figure 22 we here included one more village, where we alsoconducted research. This village is Lumango, a CBFM village located in the westernpart of Kilosa district. The first column shows how many of the respondents answeredthat their forest was a community forest (or CBFM in Lumango‟s case), and can beinterpreted as “level of awareness of”. When asked whether or not they had acommunity forest in their village, the fact that the majority of villagers in Masuguanswered “no” is no surprise, since here, many perceived their forest to be openaccess. When it comes to access and use of the forest, though, Masugu scores highest,which again not that surprising. Worth noting here is that almost 20 % morehouseholds in the CBFM village Lumango responded that they accessed and used theforest. In this sense, people still continue to rely on the forest regardless of CBFMinterventions. Vedeld at al. (2004) asks whether people are forest dependent becausethey are poor, or poor because they are forest dependent. They argue that the causalityruns mainly in the first direction and that low return activities in forestry or othersectors often is an employment of last resort.245