External Influences on and Conditions for Community Logging Management in Cameroon DRISS EZZINE DE BLAS, MANUEL RUIZ PE ´ REZ Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain JEFFREY A. SAYER IUCN, Gland, Switzerland GUILLAUME LESCUYER CIRAD-CIFOR Central Africa Regional Office, Yaounde ´, Cameroon ROBERT NASI CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia and ALAIN KARSENTY * CIRAD, Montpellier, France Summary. — Community-based forest management has been promoted widely to enable local communities capture the value of the for- ests they inhabit. Most community forests have focused on non-timber forest products. In Cameroon, the 1994 Forest Law introduced community forestry with a strong emphasis on timber harvesting. We analyze a stratified sample of 20 community forests to assess the conditions that may enable communities to capture value from their forests and the effects of the external support they have received. While communities seem to be benefiting financially from the forest, their capacity to do so is limited by their inability to capture value added in the market chain. This is due to a lack of technical skills, excessive distance to markets, competition from industrial loggers who access the newly opened logging areas, and the intensity of external help they receive. The result is a sub-optimal contribution of com- munity forests to local development. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words — community forests, logging, vertical integration, Central Africa, Cameroon 1. INTRODUCTION Community-based forest management (CBFM) has been a dominant theme of national and international forest policies in recent times (Pretzsch, 2005). The recognition of community forest management as a key component of rural development by the 8th World Forestry Congress in 1978 established the foundations of this wave of international interest (Westoby, 1987). CBFM has since gained support in international agree- ments or fora such as the International Labor Organization (Convention No. 169 of 1989) and the Rio Declaration in 1992. The legitimacy of local communities and indigenous peoples’ rights over the forests and other natural resources upon which their livelihoods have traditionally depended is nowadays widely recognized (Arnold, 1998; Colchester, Apte, Laforge, Mandondo, & Pathak, 2003; Edmunds & Wollen- berg, 2003). Numerous countries have tried to implement CBFM. Among the earliest attempts were the Community Forest Enterprises in Mexico which had their origins in the declara- tion of communal lands by the Mexican Constitution of 1917 (Antinori & Bray, 2005; Klooster, 2003). These were established as part of agrarian and forestry policy reforms and they developed in different ways throughout the 20th cen- tury (Bray, Antinori, & Torres-Rojo, 2006). Brazilian Extrac- tive Reserves are another example of CBFM that has received international attention. Initiated in 1990 for rubber tapers— ‘‘seringueiros”—and other traditional producers, they combine community and individual rights, and offer tenure security and diversified livelihood options to local populations (Allegretti, 1990; Almeida, 2002). Likewise, Joint Forest Management was launched in India through local initiatives and subse- quently supported by the government in the 1980s and 1990s with the objective of restoring degraded forest lands through the joint action of State Forestry Departments and local com- munities (Hobley, 2005; Lise, 2000). Programs to implement CBFM have tended to be a response from both international institutions and national governments to demands from local communities—mainly in Asia and La- tin America—who wished to protect their forest interests in a variety of political, economic, and ecological contexts (Sikor, 2006). Notwithstanding their grass-root intentions, CBFM schemes have often been instituted in a relatively top-down fashion and have frequently failed to reflect the diversity of economic conditions and cultures of the rural environments * Final revision accepted: March 19, 2008. World Development Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 445–456, 2009 Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved 0305-750X/$ - see front matter www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.03.011 445