Community Forestry in Central Burkina Faso

By D. Cosijnse

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Research Area: Tiogo Forest

The dry tropical Tiogo Forest located in central Burkina Faso comprises an area of 376 km2. The forest has attracted a diverse group of settlers using its precious resources for decades, if not centuries. Its users are woodcutters, farmers, (agro-)pastoralists, gatherers and hunters belonging to several ethnic groups; the Gurusni, Mossi and Fulani. The Tiogo forest is currently used by these groups for its wood, honey, fruits and nuts, medicinal roots and leaves, wild animals, fish, pasture and arable land. The Fulani pastoralists settled in and around the forest after the heavy droughts in Northern Burkina Faso during the 1970s, and their community has expanded over the years. Overexploitation of the various resources of the Tiogo forest has increasingly become an issue, as forest users have increased in number due to population growth and climate change, and as a result, the Tiogo forest cover has shrunk over the last decades.

 

The Forest Investment Program

In order to tackle overexploitation of several large forests in Burkina Faso, including the Tiogo Forest, the government of Burkina Faso hopes to shift communities away from traditional overexploitation practices, towards preservation efforts. The REDD+ funded Forest Investment Program initiated in 2015 is a result of the Burkina Faso government efforts to decentralize forest management to the community level, after preceding failures of underequipped top-down state protection. The assumption here is that - as in many other African countries nowadays - local communities are potentially able to effectively protect the forest areas and use it sustainably in the context of climate change. Hence, state support for community forestry has become an adaptation intervention, where it aims to lift resilience of forest users to ongoing and projected changes in the climate.

An important part of the Forest Investment Program is the establishment of a new Committee for the management of Tiogo forest, the Comité de Gestion Forestière. The new committee serves the purpose to expand the participation of diverse resource-users in sustainable forest management. The committee leader aims to raise awareness of forest overexploitation, and a broad range of resource-user groups was invited to join the committee, such as honey gatherers, people gathering the roots of medicinal trees, hunters and shea-butter producers. Overall, the increasing drive to use forest preservation as a climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy has intensified its practice. The emphasis on forest preservation in combination with the ambition to raise awareness on forest depletion in all layers of society has resulted in several government initiatives to co-manage the areas with local populations. 17 Unions representing 400 groups throughout the country kept sight over some 6.000 km2 of land in 2014, including the Tiogo forest.

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research objectives

The research first focused on forest-use and the role of forest resources in the climate change adaptation strategies of several communities using the forest. In order to gain knowledge on this, the livelihoods of the diverse forest users has been analysed, as well as their efforts to adapt to changes in the climate and the role of forest resources therein. Furthermore, the forest users’ perception, engagement, as well as conflict and cooperation in the Tiogo forest management has been analysed. Second, the research continued by studying the implications of the Forest Investment Program on the grassroots level social context. By employing social capital theory, levels of social capital have been analysed within and between communities that use the forest, as well as between these communities and local authorities.

Research Results

  • Income generating activities vary widely between the communities using the Tiogo Forest. The dominant community undertakes dry and rainy season agriculture and woodcutting. Another community mainly undertakes fishing and rainy season agriculture. The Fulani community are still pastoral, but also increasingly undertake farming activities.
  • While different communities utilise different forest resources, climate change is perceived as tangible and threatening by all the studied communities because the communities have grown increasingly dependent on the forest resources the last decades. Therefore, the Tiogo Forest plays a key role in the diverse strategies of users to adapt to climate change.
  • The Forest Investment Program and the the Comité de Gestion Forestière have not been able to influence local forest management. Woodcutters continue to play a central role in forest management while Fulani and other minority forest-user groups continue to be left out of forest management and decision-making processes. Their limited involvement in forest management is not the consequence of unwillingness to contribute, but rather the consequence of insufficient consideration of existing social structures in the decentralization of forest management. The newly set-up committee of forest-user groups is mainly ruled by the same leaders who ruled the woodcutter’s union previously in charge of forest management
  • The establishment of the committee has not necessarily fuelled or created conflicts between different resource-user groups in Tiogo forest yet, but it has not enhanced cooperation either. The reformed “community forestry” plan has not been able to make forest management more participatory, and instead enforced the already existing unequal divisions of power between the woodcutters and other users of the Tiogo forest.