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een trying to deal with the issue, however, many years of efforts to halt these trendshave not been as successful as hoped, something which have affected the livelihoodsof many Tanzanians who depend on the forests and woodlands for their livelihood.As with much of sub-Saharan Africa, conservation and preservation of naturalresources have been carried out in Tanzania ever since pre-colonial times, albeit indifferent ways as time passed. Before the colonization period it was done on the basisof setting aside and protecting areas for times of need or emergencies, but during thecolonial era the notion of conserving nature to guarantee access to it in the future wasreplaced by the idea of exclusion and division between nature and humanity and anapproach commonly known as “fortress preservation”. By this, huge forest areas weregazetted as Forest Reserves under state authority, which constrained access or use ofproducts within the reserves, by local people. This was also a way to reducedeforestation and it continued also after national independence. Poaching and illegalexploitation still continued, and in the 1980s a new policy approach emerged (Kistler2009).As public confidence in the government‟s ability to own and manage the ForestReserves diminished, the local communities demanded to become more involved inthe management of their resources. Also within the theoretical debate on forestmanagement a participatory approach gained ground. In early 1990s a number ofparticipatory forest management pilot projects, which transferred the ownership andmanagement responsibility from central to village government, were launched inTanzania. Parallel with these pilot projects a review of the country‟s forest policy wasmade, as was reforms within Tanzania‟s economic and political sphere, all of whichset the stage for a favourable legal environment for PFM (Blomley, Pliegner et al.2005). Of particular importance was the National Forest Policy of 1998 and the ForestAct of 2002, both of which makes PFM a main national focus (Massawe 2008). Inmany ways Tanzania is now seen to be in the forefront of PFM in Africa, and in areport published by the Forestry and Beekeeping Division (FBD) it states that asmuch as 2,300 villages covering over 4 million hectares of forest land is either beingestablished or operating under PFM in 2008 (Blomley and Iddi 2009).9