Does Participatory Forest Management Encourage Tree Planting? An Example from Tanzania

Abstract

The effectiveness of efforts to protect forests in lower-income countries from excessive degradation, such as through the introduction of participatory forest management, depends in part on how nearby rural populations respond to these efforts. In this paper we focus on tree planting on private land – an important yet understudied response. Combining a conceptual spatial landscape model with primary data, we demonstrate that villagers do plant trees in response to increased forest protection, but only when there are no unprotected forests within their landscape to which they can displace their extraction activities. Our research highlights how tricky it is methodologically to isolate this response in Tanzania, because both tree planting and the siting of forests under increased protection following the introduction of participatory forest management are responses to forest degradation.