Community, forestry and conditionality in The Gambia

Abstract

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.