Management Schemes and Resource Access in Multiple-Use Forests in the Congo Basin

Congo Basin;Forest;Natural Resources and Environment

Clay, NathanPersha, Lauren ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Congo Basin;    Forest;    Natural Resources and Environment;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86072/Clay%20N%20masters%20thesis%20final.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

With this master’s thesis, I attempt to hone in on the notion of resource governance across scalesand through time. I use three complementary and interlinked frameworks in effort to address thecomplexity of multi-functional forests in an era of heightened global connectivity, recognizingthat current interventions are intimately tied to myriad entities and socio-ecological processes aswell as historical contexts of these processes. In detailing how processes of governance drawfrom and shape systems of forest and wildlife ecology, and how those systems in turn shapegovernance strategies, I aim to begin to depict the interrelationship between humans and theCongo Basin environment in the form of a natural history.Part I depicts the schematic of hybrid resource governance that is designed to implement regionwideecosystem scale conservation. I focus on socio-ecological system of broadleaf evergreenmoist forests in Southeastern Cameroon. There, an influx of transnational actors including timbercompanies, safari hunting operations, and conservationist NGOs has been shaping the landscapeover the past twenty years with resource-use zones and management plans that delimit the termsof partnerships, especially user rights and responsibilities. Based on interviews with a range ofactors and analysis of management plans, I examine how local knowledge and decision makingpower factors into forest management.Part II focuses on how resource access for local-level forest users are shaped by schemes ofhybrid governance in multiple-use forests. It also identifies some potential drivers of agriculturaltransition and discusses the implications of the current forest zoning and management schemeson biodiversity. It begins with a literature review about land-use in the Congo Basin and driversof agricultural conversion. Focus group and individual interviews with people in five villagesThe ecological outcomes of resource-use zoning are discussed in terms of landscape ecology, onwhich rests the tenets of the ecosystem-scale approach to conservation. This paper is thus anattempt to begin to connect spatial analysis with ethnographic methods.Part III focuses on the process of designing management plans, discussing the plans themselvesas ;;boundary objects’—focal points where multiple agendas and cultural conceptions cometogether in order for people from multiple social worlds to attempt to cooperate. I discuss theplans and their ensuing spatial organizations and delimitations of tasks as intimate spaces wheremyriad knowledges converge. Using the case study of interactions between various actors atvarious scales I examine how forests are becoming spaces of increasingly intimate linkages thattransform resource use patterns and governance strategies, which are themselves importantfactors shaping the socio-ecological landscape. Drawing largely on frameworks of criticalpolitical ecology, discourse analysis and science and technology studies, this paper attempts toengage with environmental and institutional/cultural change as deeply entangled processes.Although each of these papers is meant to stand on its own, with a discrete argument, the themesand contexts overlap extensively. Each paper presents a unique perspective