This study aims to assess the impact of a participatory forest management programme on household wellbeing, local governance and forest degradation.
This study looks at Tanzania's Joint Forest Management Programme (JFM), a participatory programme with the core objectives of improving livelihoods, strengthening local governance and restoring forests. Decentralision and participatory approaches are increasingly being viewed as key tools to achieving conservation goals while meeting social and economic challenges that drive unsustainable resource use and loss of habitat and livelihoods.
- What is the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of JFM on each of the three families of outcomes that the programme aims to impact: forest governance within villages, household livelihoods, and forest conditions in Tanzanian forest reserves?
- How does the impact of JFM vary across key sub-groups of interest, particularly for poorest villages and households relative to other villages and households?
- Drawing on the qualitative and contextual data from each of the study sites, in what ways can JFM be better targeted towards village and forest reserve contexts where it is likely to have positive impacts?
The study uses a quasi-experimental approach to determine the average impact of Tanzania's decentralised forest policy.
Theory of change
Decentralisation is hypothesised to conserve resources as well or better than centralised management by government agencies, while also strengthening the governance and livelihoods of local populations.
Decentralisation theory suggests that local decision makers will make more informed and efficient management decisions than central governments, due to their site-specific forest knowledge and lower cost to engage in management activities
The study was undertaken across 110 sites and 3,363 households in 7 regions of Tanzania with primary data being collected over a 16 month period between 2012 and 2014, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The analysis uses a quasi-experimental matching estimator obtained via a genetic matching algorithm. The average treatment effect on the treated is estimated at the household level using one-to-one matching with replacement. Robustness tests and sensitivity analyses are performed to assess confidence in the results. The study also draws on qualitative and contextual data collected from each of the study sites to gain insights into how the programme can be made more effective.
The study found positive impacts for the first step in a pathway from decentralisation via the JFP to improved forest governance outcomes at the village level. The programme had a strong positive impact on local-level governance, particularly on good governance functions of village natural resource committees and to a smaller extent for village governance overall.
Overall, no impacts of the programme are detected on total household income, forest-derived income, or an asset-based measure of wellbeing. However, the study also demonstrated that JFM is predominantly implemented in contexts where there are no obvious livelihood opportunities for villages which participate in managing government forest reserves.
In terms of forest conditions, the analysis suggested that the programme does not lead to a change in deforestation rates over the status quo centrally-managed forest reservation system in Tanzania during the period from 2000-2012, however there is some evidence that households may be changing their harvesting behaviour in programme forest reserves due to stricter protection and more effective patrols.
Implications for policy and practice
Overall, study findings point to net positive impacts of the programme in comparison to the traditional state-managed approach in Tanzanian forest reserves. These impacts are encouraging, especially taking into account that there is wide variation in the extent to which JFM implementation in practice conforms to the programme's formal design as set out in Tanzanian policy, particularly around revenue generation opportunities and revenue sharing arrangements with villages, and full legal processing of JFM agreements with villages.
Implications for further research
The positive impacts of the programme could be further strengthened by speeding up the approval and formalisation process, reviewing how benefits for communities can be generated from protection forest reserves in Tanzania, and improved targeting at the local level.