This study investigates the extent to which communities have been provided with economic incentives to become involved in sustainable forest management in Eastern and Southern Africa. The study has a number of clear findings:
- If communities are to be willing, and economically able, to involve themselves in sustainable forest management they must receive greater economic benefits from conserving forests than from degrading them. Sustainable forest management must tangibly improve local economic welfare, and generate local economic benefits to sufficient levels and in appropriate forms to counterbalance the opportunity costs incurred by sustainable forest management.
- There is generally little recognition by either economic or forest sector decision-makers and planners of the high economic value of forest resources for communities, or the potentially high local economic costs of sustainable forest management.
- The contribution of the forest sector to national economies is generally underestimated as a result of emphasis only on formal wood-based industries and omission of consideration of the value of non-timber products and functions.
- Because the forest sector has such a low recorded value throughout all the countries studied, it has been accorded little priority in economic policies and development strategies. In many cases, economic policies in Eastern and Southern Africa have actually provided economic disincentives to communities in sustainable forest management,
- Macroeconomic policies have influenced community involvement in sustainable forest. A positive influence has been as a result of the national trends towards decentralisation, privatisation and devolution of the role of public sector, which have a greater degree of participation in forest use and management. Economic liberalisation has dismantled many of the price and market distortions that have traditionally discriminated against forests as a land use. However, many of these positive influences have been counterbalanced by a series of economic crises and conditions that have undermined local livelihoods and contributed to forest degradation and loss.
- Sectoral economic policies largely omit forestry concerns, and tend to place emphasis on activities which have the potential to lead to the unsustainable exploitation, clearance and degradation of forest species and areas. Many sectoral economic activities benefit from, use or degrade forest goods and services at low or zero cost. Sectoral economic instruments have sometimes acted as perverse incentives against community involvement in sustainable forest management –for example unsupportive systems of land and resource tenure, and subsidies to resource or land-degrading activities.
- Policies in environment and natural resources sectors pay little attention to economic considerations, including the need to make conservation profitable to communities, the need to raise finance and funds, and the need to counterbalance disincentives and perverse incentives provided by macroeconomic and sectoral economic policies.
- National forest policies have moved away from a focus on strict protection and commercial production to approaches geared towards using forest resources in pursuit of sustainable development goals, and to the economic benefit of local communities. In line with this shifting focus, four main types of economic measures have been deployed in Eastern and Southern Africa in support of community involvement in forest management: benefit-sharing, the development of forest-based markets and enterprises, the promotion of local alternatives to forest-based sources of income and subsistence, and direct payments to community members.
- Despite a much greater emphasis on “community-based” approaches to forest management, there are few instances where this has actually managed to counterbalance the local-level opportunity costs associated with forests or to generate substantive economic benefits of a sufficient quality or quantity to compete on economic terms with the unsustainable use of forest land and resources.
