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In a difficult political economy, marked notably by a multifaceted crisis, Cameroon, like many other African countries, launched the restructuring of the policy and legal framework that governed the management of forest until the mid-1990s. Given the deep conflict of discourse surrounding the iss...

The Ottotomo Forest Reserve in the Central Province of Cameroon is one of the protected areas in the country where several management strategies have been tested with varying degrees of success (e.g., the Tropical Shelterwood System (TSS) silvicultural technique was piloted in this forest more th...

When Germans colonized Cameroon in the nineteenth century, most of the ethnic groups living in the forest zone had already established territories. However, Germany then became the legal owner of land and forests. This brutal cohabitation of the new version of the state and customary systems of t...

One of the major innovations in Cameroon’s forest industry is the devolution of management authority to local communities. These communities have viewed this shift as a response to their age-old demands — and frustrations — regarding profits from commercial harvesting of forests on their land bas...

Theory informs us that decentralisation, a process through which powers, responsibilities and resources are devolved by the central state to lower territorial entities and regionally/locally elected bodies, increases efficiency, participation, equity, and environmental sustainability. Many types ...

Access to natural resource is governed by competition and conflicts all the over the world. Alternative approaches to conflict resolution require assets provided by social negotiation, mediation and other types of social tools. This paper is based on a case of conflict of access to forest and on ...

Among many other stakes, the economic stake derived from the exploitation of tropical forest resources is a burning issue. This is evidenced by insecurity in intergenerational access to forest resources and financial benefits relating to the latter, on the one hand, and by a deep iniquity at the...

The Congo Basin is marked by the historical and cultural persistence, and resilience, of slash-and-burn agriculture – also known as shifting cultivation (or ‘forest agriculture’), on the one hand, and by contradictions between the relevance of externally introduced agricultural technologies and t...

The Central Africa region (CAfR), generally known as the Congo Basin, is an “eco-region” representing the World’s largest rainforest after Amazonia. Its importance for biodiversity conservation, livelihoods, human well-being, research and policy-making is already well known. This paper documents ...

The rural reform that has been taking place in Cameroon since 1992 has introduced new operating methods in community agricultural infrastructure and local forest management. There has been a proliferation of rural organizations, grouped under the “groupes d’initiative commune” (GICs), new coopera...