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Forest management devolution: gap between technicians' design and villagers' practices in Madagascar.
Fanny Rives1, Stéphanie M Carrière, Pierre Montagne
1CIRAD, UR GREEN, TA C-47/F Campus International de Baillarguet, 34398, Montpellier, France, fanny_rives@yahoo.fr.
Environmental Management
|August 27, 2013
Summary
Madagascar
Area of Science:
- Environmental Science
- Sociology
- Ecology
Background:
- Tropical forest management shifted in the 1980s to include rural communities.
- Madagascar's 1996 Gelose law aimed to integrate local people into forest management.
- A gap exists between planned and actual changes in forest management practices.
Purpose of the Study:
- Analyze the gap between planned and observed forest management under Madagascar's Gelose law.
- Utilize the social-ecological system (SES) concept to understand this gap.
- Identify factors contributing to discrepancies in forest management implementation.
Main Methods:
- Conceptualized planned and observed forest management as two distinct social-ecological systems (SESs).
- Analyzed differences between the designed Gelose contract (targeted SES) and practices in Ambatoloaka village (observed SES) in 2010.
- Examined the heterogeneity of forest users and uses impacting management.
Main Results:
- The observed SES is dynamic and heterogeneous, shaped by Gelose law constraints/opportunities and other factors.
- A key gap arises from static perceptions in the targeted SES versus dynamic realities in the observed SES.
- The targeted SES's focus on charcoal-making contrasts with the observed SES's reliance on multiple forest uses.
Conclusions:
- The heterogeneity and dynamism of the observed social-ecological system (SES) are critical for understanding forest management.
- Bridging the gap requires aligning static plans with the dynamic, multi-use reality of local forest management.
- Reshaping the SES offers opportunities to improve Gelose law implementation in Madagascar.
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