Banana, Abwoli Y., Gombya-Ssembajjwe, William S., Bahati, Joseph, Kajembe, George C., Kihiyo, V. B. M. S., and Paul Ongugo. 2000. "Effective Monitoring of Decentralized Forest Resources in East Africa." Presented at "Constituting the Commons: Crafting Sustainable Commons in the New Millenium", the Eighth Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, May 31-June 4.

Abstract

"There is no doubt that state control of forest resources in many countries has proved to be ineffective in solving and halting the rate of deforestation. The financial and human resources available to government forest departments are inadequate to carry out the task of policing forested areas without the participation of local communities.

"However, the success of decentralizing resources to local communities depends on solving three puzzles; the problem of supplying new institutions, the problem of credible commitment and the problem of mutual monitoring.

"IFRI, studies in Uganda have known that monitoring and rule enforcement is very important for the success of decentralized forest resources (Banana and Gombya-Ssembajjwe 1999). Trying to understand how use-groups and/ or communities have monitored their own conformance to their agreements as well as their conformance to the rules in the E. African region is the challenge of this study.

"The study revealed that an effective monitoring strategy involves having good incentives for the monitors and a mechanism to supervise or monitor the monitors themselves. Where effective was effective, there are few illegal activities, high basal area and the physical and biological condition of the CPR was expected to improve with time."