Measuring the local community's participation in the management of community forests in Cameroon

Received 26 January 1998; revised and accepted 3 June 1998 Cameroon revised its forestry policy and included the legal concept of community forests, a concept dicult to develop. This study aims to resolve this diculty by understanding the concept as it is designed by the Cameroon Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MINEF). To this end, two formulae, the second simpler than the ®rst, were developed to measure the percentage of involvement of the local community in the process of implementing a ``community forest''. A questionnaire constructed to assess the importance of the activities in this process provided the coecients for the ®rst formula. The questionnaire was administered to ®ve groups representing the possible partici- pants in the implementation process. There are statistically signi®cant di€erences among the mean ratings of importance by the ®ve groups and for the various activities. Despite the latter di€erences, the numerical di€erence between the two formulae is negligible. Correlations of the ranking of the importance of the activities predict successful collaboration among MINEF, conservation project ocials, and members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In contrast, the local commu- nities are less likely to collaborate with the ®rst three groups. There is a gulf between the commu- nities and outside organizations (Ministry, conservation project ocials and NGOs). Strategies for facilitating the process of implementing the ``community forest'' are suggested. Keywords: community forest; forest management; Cameroon.

Measuring-Comm-Part-in-NFM-Cameroon.pdf — PDF document, 136Kb