Three decades of the practice of decentralised forest management in Africa: A systematic review of current knowledge and prospects

Abstract

Decentralised Forest Management (DFM), a forest management approach involving local communities, has been implemented in many countries worldwide to remedy the failure of state-centred forest management to conserve resources. This review shed new insights into the progress of DFM in Africa. Despite the great interest in forest management, many African countries have limited awareness of DFM. Our in-depth bibliometric analysis based on multiple online search engines covered the period 1992–2021 and yielded 1064 articles, of which 245 were selected for this review. Publications recorded on DFM came from 25 countries, covering four of the five African sub-regions. Approximately 77 % of the retained publications came from East Africa alone. Community participation, institutional arrangements, and contribution of DFM to forest conservation and community livelihoods were the main foci of the studies. Apart from the Village Land Forest approach, which devolves full power to local communities in Tanzania, most DFM schemes in Africa are implemented through deconcentration or delegation, whereby the local communities are primarily used as a workforce. This resulted in low interest among local people in forestry activities and limited implementation of DFM following the cessation of the initial DFM projects. Our analysis also highlighted gaps in knowledge about DFM regarding adjacent land use, conflict resolution, and ethnobotnical study. Our findings should guide scholars in their future research, as well as decision-makers in developing sound community-based management strategies for tropical forests in the context of their overexploitation and rapid degradation. We argue that significant efforts are still needed to achieve the ideal implementation of the DFM approach in Africa.