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Community, forestry and conditionality in The Gambia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Richard A. Schroeder
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Extract

This article seeks to explain the resurgence of the ‘community’ scale as a central organising principle guiding contemporary environmental initiatives in Africa. It sets policies centred on the notion of community-based natural resource management in their regional political-economic context, demonstrating that fiscal constraints have forced environmental managers to rely more heavily on community efforts to accomplish environmental objectives. In effect, it argues that environmental managers confronted with increased expectations on the part of donors and their government superiors have seized the opportunity to devolve responsibility for environmental management to ‘the community’ as a means of expanding programmes while incurring minimal additional costs. The case study involves a German-funded community forestry project in the Gambia. In 1991, in order to speed up the implementation of ‘scientific’ management on state-controlled forest land, the Gambian-German Forestry Project, a branch of the national Forestry Department, began granting rural communities leasehold rights to community forestry reserves. In each instance, however, community representatives were required by contract to commit their constituencies to a rigorous set of management tasks. Participatory rhetoric notwithstanding, the project offered communities little more than graduated sovereignty over forests. Programme conditions ensured that project personnel would control the finest details of forest management, not despite, but because of, the evolution of tenure rights to the community.

Résumé

Cet article cherche à expliquer la résurgence de la dimension “communaute” en tant que principe organisateur central gouvernant les initiatives environnementales contemporaines en Afrique. II situe dans leur contexte politico-économique régional des politiques centrées sur la notion de gestion communautaire des ressources naturelles, en démontrant que les contraintes fiscales ont forcé les responsables de l'environnement à s'en remettre plus largement aux efforts des communautés pour réaliser des objectifs environnementaux. Dans le fond, il suggère que les responsables de Penvironnement, confrontés aux attentes croissantes des organismes de financement et de leurs superiéurs hiérarchiques, ont saisi l'occasion de déléguer la responsabilité de la gestion environnementale à “la communauté” afin d'étendre les programmes à moindres frais. Cette étude cite le cas d'un projet communautaire d'exploitation forestière en Gambie financé par l'Allemagne. En 1991, afin d'accélérer la mise en oeuvre d'une gestion “scientifique” sur les terres forestières régies par l'Etat, le projet intitulé Gambian German Forestry Project, sous la tutelle de l'Office National des Forêts, a commencé à accorder aux communautés rurales des droits de bail afférents aux réserves forestières communautaires. Or, dans chacun des cas observes, les représentants des communautés étaient tenus par contrat d'engager leurs administrés à respecter un programme rigoureux de tâches de gestion. En dépit de la rhétorique de participation, ce projet n'offrait aux communautés guère plus qu'une souveraineté graduée sur les forêts. En vertu de leurs termes, ces programmes veillaient à ce que le personnel du projet contrôle le moindre détail de gestion des forêts, non pas en dépit du transfert des droits de bail à la communauté, mais en raison de celle-ci.

Type
Who's to control the forests?
Information
Africa , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , January 1999 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1999

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