Participation in Practice: A comparative Evaluation of Community Members’ Level of Involvement in Management of Rural and Urban Forests in Kenya

Participatory system of governance entails involvement of stakeholders in the process of policy formulation, implementation and decision making. Studies done on the subject of participation in forest management has considered participation in general without going into the details of level of participation and decision making. Furthermore, this studies have had a bias on participation in rural set up and thus there is little that has been documented on participation in the context of urban forests. This study was conducted to establish the level of CFA members’ participation and decision making in rural forests as compared to urban forests. Kiptuget Forest in Baringo County and Ngong Road Forest in Nairobi City County were purposefully selected to represent rural and urban forests respectively. The study employed both primary data collected using questionnaires and key informants interviews and secondary data collected from review of PFM technical reports, articles, and publications. Data was analyzed using percentages, statistical measures of central tendencies, tabulations, frequencies and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).The study revealed that that NRFA had more regular and well attended meeting compared to KICOFA where meetings were only held when necessary. It was further established that majority of the members of NRFA (41.5%) were engaged at a consultative level of decision making while majority of members of KICOFA (65.4%) were involved at an informative level of decision making. It was also noted that due to its better financial capacity, NRFA had managed to hire scouts to help in monitoring and enforcement of forest regulations. The study recommends that the legislature should work on reviewing the legal framework and regulations governing PFM implementation to grant more decision making powers to the CFA, the CFAs and KFS should work together to build the capacity of CFAs for them to effectively participate in co management of the forest.