Forest Management Decentralization and Social Conflicts in Cameroon: Rethinking Intergenerational Access to Forests and its Resources in Southeastern Cameroon

Abstract

"Decentralization has longer been perceived as an appropriate approach for the limitation of social conflicts in the forest management process in Cameroon. In regard to the current processes and experiences of forest management decentralization, this assumption needs to be re-questioned. The paper aims to demonstrate that the forest management decentralization has not yet contributed to reducing social conflicts and establishing democracy in the management of forest resources; but to their displacement and diversification. For example, current practices reveal some iniquity and insecurity as concerns access to forest resources and the benefits accruing from their exploitation by young people, women and old persons. There is a considerable imbalance among these social categories in the allocation and use of forests and the financial resources accruing from their exploitation. Current practices exclude young people whose needs and expectations in terms of local development are different from the preoccupations of women and old persons. Young people and to a certain extent women militate for investments in sustainable socio-economic infrastructures whereas old persons advocate a circumstantial and immediate management of resources accruing from forest exploitation. The political and social conflicts arising from such contradictions are, among others, one of the reasons for the poor impact of the management of forests and forest resources on local development activities. The decentralization process is leading to a displacement of social conflicts in the management of forest resources, from the centre to the periphery, and to a diversity of conflicts of interests and power among local actors, merely, between the local populations and the municipalities and among the local populations themselves (between social generations, between village families and between villages in the same region). It is necessary to resort to pluralism as a political approach for the conciliation of multifarious, contradictory and different interests in the management of forests and the benefits accruing from their exploitation in the rural areas of Cameroon, so as to go beyond the norms governing the management of forests and integrate it in a socially equitable and democratic process."