Contribution of Participatory Forest Management to Forest Conservation in Benin

Abstract

Forests are reported as an important means to adapt and mitigate climate change. Unfortunately, forest management remain challenging in developing countries in general and particularly in West Africa, despite the advent of Participatory Forest Management (PFM) concept to slow down deforestation. PFM was introduced to meet simultaneously the needs of local people and the conservation of forest resources. The current study sought to explore the contribution of PFM on the sustainable management of the resources of three different forests in Benin. Multi-stage sampling techniques was applied for achieving this study. In the first stage of the sampling procedure, three forest reserves in Lama, Penessoulou and Sota forest were purposively selected based on experience on PFM and actively participating local community. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from through questionnaires, focus group discussions (FGDs) and key informant interviews. A total of 436, 458, and 211 respondents were questioned for forest ecosystem services evaluation, ethnobotanical knowledge assessment and forest governance assessment, respectively. Moreover, 8 FGDs and 8 key informant interviews were held per study objective. The results revealed that the considered forest reserves are under deconcentration and delegation management with a low to acceptable level of governance. The current way of implementing of PFM approach with low involvement of local people in decision-making process negatively affected the perception and availability of provisioning services as well as the community knowledge of forest plant species used for food and cultural purpose. Furthermore, the implementation failed to enhance the awareness on regulating and supporting services and lessen the community knowledge on forest plant species used for firewood and timber services purpose in order to favour the sustainable use of forest resources. In consequence, the forest experiencing a free access to resources presented a more degraded state of the population stand of the useful xvii plant species than the one experiencing controlled access to forest resources. More involvement of local management committee members in decision-making process added to more sensitization on indirect ecosystem services and a share of forest direct benefits would improve the forest governance to achieve the sustainable management of the forest resources.