ABSTRACT
In the postcolonial period, forest resources in many African countries were centrally controlled, and local communities were excluded from their use or management. In the 1980s and 1990s, policies to decentralise management began to be promoted by international donors, prompted by both degradation of forest resources and wider demands to reduce the size of the state through structural adjustment. Drawing on both published literature and our own work, we explore how one such policy – Participatory Forest Management (PFM) – interacted with existing power dynamics at multiple layers of Tanzanian society. We show how a policy that was designed to shift power away from the centre has been resisted or co-opted by different actors, nullifying some of the policy objectives and resulting in some cases of elite capture, and effective privatisation of previously de facto communal resources. This process is ongoing, and power relations continue to evolve in response to the policy, some 20 years after it was first implemented. Nevertheless, the development and implementation of PFM in Tanzania has been subject to the very power relations it sought to challenge, and the limitations of state capacity it aimed to resolve. This case shows the limitations of policy innovations driven by foreign stakeholders, if they lack the support of key actors.
