Splitted Wood as Natural Resources Use: What Reality for the Management in Common of the Forest Management Scheme of Bougnounou (Province of Ziro Burkina Faso)?

Abstract

"This study focuses on how rural actors exit the externally induced but locally accepted creation of a protected forest as a common resource. It deals with the case of a forest management scheme, created on this protected forest, in two villages in Burkina Faso. Rural communities, in particular the local actors involved in this forest management scheme, have their proper understandings and perceptions of what is means to be linked to a common resource as managers, as 'owners' and as workers producing economic benefits for themselves and for others (State, wood merchants). We will mainly focus through this practice of splitted wood on the logics and strategies of local actors and their understanding of government policy with respect to renewable natural resource management. Local practices, around the already put in place and very well organized forest management scheme, will also be described in this study. The main activities of the forest management scheme in Bougnounou administrative district are big wood cutting and selling through a wood market chain. The splitted wood is an activity developed besides the big wood market since 5 years (in terms of increasing). The splitted wood is defined as the rest of small woods (branches of trees) which stay and which have a diameter lower than 10 centimeters. But in practice it is all wood cutting in pieces and selling by stack inside the village on the main roads.

"In this paper, we choose two neighboring villages in the administrative district of Bougnounou: the villages of Dana and Zao are both situated on two main roads and belong to the forest management scheme. These villages are the first splitted wood seller in this management chain. They are the first who thereby demonstrate that this management scheme is not what they want to do in the exploitation of the forest. The forest management scheme is absolutely based on the management in common of 'non common resources' (the protected forest of the management scheme). The local actors in these two villages 'refuse' to follow the common management scheme created by the project. This notion of 'common resources' seems to indicate indeed an evident reality, certainly, but vague and non-existent at the same moment at the level of the local actors. The local actors try to fight for their individual interests rather than to work for the common.

"These questions on participatory management based on common renewable natural resources and on the wood chain process have been the focus of many studies."