ABSTRACT
The Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF), an initiative of the central government in Sierra Leone, was designed to strengthen citizen participation in decision making about natural resource management. 1 Like other community-based natural resource management initiatives in Africa, 2 the DACDF embraces community-led decision making as a means of ensuring that more benefits accrue to impoverished and vulnerable communities than has historically been the case. 3 Among the major goals of the DACDF are to redress unequal power relationships within the diamond industry and to make local decision making about diamond resources more equitable. But the DACDF has largely failed to address many of the underlying power issues that shape decision making at the local level. The endurance of prewar patrimonial relationships subverts fair access to, and control of, the nation’s diamond resources and threatens prospects for peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. Although the Sierra Leone Ministry of Mineral Resources has developed a new set of procedures and guidelines to address the shortcomings of the DACDF, it remains unclear whether these guidelines will address the fundamental issue: namely, how community members participate in decision making about natural resources.
