The Rainforests of Cameroon - PROFOR

In-Depth Analysis of Impacts 105Box 5.6Community forest reforms: Too little, too late?Community forestry is one of the key areas of Cameroon’s forest sector reforms.Community forestry schemes should enable communities to participate indecisions and draw more economic benefits from the forest. Yet communityforestry initially received less attention from the international community andgovernment of Cameroon than efforts to regulate the formal forest sector andrestrain corrupt and illegal practices.With time, a stronger national and international constituency has emergedto advocate for community forestry, especially to support social welfare goals,forest management that reduces environmental impacts, and environmentalservices. Currently community forests are near the top of the forest agenda andreceive considerable attention from donor agencies.Has this attention come too late? Could stronger, earlier efforts to establishcommunity forestry have stemmed the tide of illegal logging by paying moreattention to legalizing communities’ forest rights, establishing more benignpartnerships with industry than those that have emerged, and ultimately benefitingcommunities more than community elites?It is not clear that community forestry could have developed and beenadopted more widely without bringing the expanding weight of industrial forestryand political patronage under control. Throughout the forest-rich countriesof Central Africa in the 1990s, forest laws, tenurial regimes for land andtrees, and Forest Administration mandates gave industry a highly privilegedplace in relation to local populations and the environment. Under these circumstances,regulating industrial forestry and creating instruments that wouldstrengthen people’s claim on forests appeared to be a prerequisite for promotingcommunity forestry in Cameroon. Even in hindsight it remains doubtful thatcommunity forestry strategies would have gained ground otherwise.with precision unless natural boundaries such as rivers are present, andconflicts are frequent when boundaries are set (Takforyan 2001; Karsenty,Mendouga, and Pénelon 1997). Most community forests are created inareas that lie between Delivered two by villages The World and Bank are e-library claimed to: by both—perhapsThe World Bankindicating that the desire to establish IP : 192.86.100.34 a community forest is based largelyon the desire to protect land Mon, from 09 Nov the 2009 incursions 17:06:18 of others.It is increasingly common for categories of forest tenure to overlap.For example, a timber company can have rights to harvest a production(c) The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank