Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa: Policies, Incentives and Options for the Rural Poor

By P. Dewees, B. Campbell, Y. Katerere, Almeida Sitoe, A. Cunningham, A. Angelsen, Sven Wunder. 2010

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Miombo woodlands cover vast areas of southern Africa. Of comparatively little interest for export-oriented commercial logging, they are part of a complex system of rural land use that integrates woodland management with crops and livestock. There is also evidence that woodland resources are extensively used for household consumption, greatly reducing the risk of households falling deeper into poverty as a result of environmental or economic stress. New opportunities for improving the management of miombo woodlands, with poverty mitigation in mind, suggest four policy options. First, communities are becoming more active in managing local natural resources, a result of decentralization and land reforms, which suggests that there may be good scope for strengthening related policy and legal frameworks and the measures to implement them. Second, new and integrated conservation-development approaches are emerging, which suggests possible scope for providing payments for environmental services to increase the value of managed woodlands. Third, markets throughout the region are developing and expanding, which suggests great scope for enhancing forest-based markets by removing restrictive legislation and by supporting local producers and forest enterprises. Fourth, all these opportunities suggest that public forest institutions can be revitalized by strengthening their service delivery orientations, with poverty mitigation as a main objective.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Soil Science

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Citations in the corpus

Contribution of forest provisioning ecosystem services to rural livelihoods in the Miombo woodlands of Zambia (2013, background): “Miombo woodlands provide an array of benefits to rural livelihoods (Chirwa et al. 2008; Dewees et al. 2010; Kalaba et al. 2009).”
Wild Edible Fruits: A Systematic Review of an Under-Researched Multifunctional NTFP (Non-Timber Forest Product) (2019, background): “From a landscape perspective, use of NTFPs has been proposed to incentivize conservation of forests [207], in turn fostering ecosystem services and climate change resilience [3,90,208], as well as strengthening food security [209,210].”
Models for estimation of tree volume in the miombo woodlands of Tanzania (2014, background): “The miombo woodland provides a wide range of biophysical goods and services ranging from the provision of food, fuel wood, medicine, construction materials and some ecosystem services such as carbon and water management services (e.g. Dewees et al. 2010).”
Forests, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Broadening the Empirical Base (2014, background): “Conversely, degradation threats may justify external conditional compensations to smallholders for conserving rather than degrading environmental services, perhaps creating a new engine for forest-based livelihood contributions (e.g., Dewees et al., 2010).”