When community forestry meets REDD plus : has REDD plus helped address implementation barriers to participatory forest management in Tanzania?

Tanzania has a progressive forest policy and legal jurisdiction for land and natural resource tenure, coupled with a strong decentralisation process that mandates village institutions with forest management responsibilities. Participatory forest management (PFM) has been a central part of government as well as a donor focus in the forest sector since the early 1990s. Numerous studies have been carried out by Tanzanian and international researchers to assess performance and synthesise experiences of PFM in recent years. The results are well documented, including the identification of a number of key bottlenecks to implementation and up-scaling. From 2009 onwards, a series of pilot projects were launched to develop and test local-level approaches to REDD+, all of which have now come to an end, and have recently been subjected to external evaluations. A central theme of many of these projects was the application of community-based approaches to forest and woodland management, building strongly on the legal framework for PFM. When REDD+ was adopted by the Tanzanian government as a new policy, feelings among civil society regarding how REDD+ might impact hard-won forest and land tenure rights were mixed. Some observers feared that REDD+ would stifle PFM and lead to a recentralisation of forest tenure by government, while others felt that REDD+ offered new opportunities for addressing long-standing bottlenecks and governance barriers to PFM implementation. Combining PFM with the specific goal of reducing forest carbon emissions has generated important lessons, some of which have the potential to strengthen the application of PFM in Tanzania and elsewhere. In some cases, we found that orienting PFM to REDD+ goals has helped address long-standing barriers to PFM implementation. In other cases, REDD+ has highlighted new weaknesses with current approaches to PFM, while elsewhere it has created problems where none existed before.