Over the past decade, the re-scaling of conservation from the national to the village scale through the community-based natural resources management model has become the trend in African conservation, yet its relative benefits and costs remain unclear. While there are strong theoretical reasons in development and common-pool resource management theory to expect both conservation and social benefits from the model, initial evidence suggests that expected improvements in levels of local participation, conservation initiatives and resource management, economic and administrative efficiency, social equity, and development often fail to materialize. The objective of this research is to conduct an assessment of community-based forest management (CBFM) in southern Malawi as a solution to the escalating environmental "crisis" arising from deforestation; and to find out what "works" and does not, and why. Cognizant of the complexity of human/environment interactions, the study will integrate biophysical and socio-spatial factors of landscape change in the miombo biome of southern Africa. The central hypothesis is that a mismatch exists between the ecological scale of forest fragmentation processes and the social scale of forest management imposed by the CBFM model, and that this scalar mismatch undermines forest conservation efforts. To test this, the study will combine approaches from landscape ecology, land use/land cover change studies, common-pool resource theory, and political ecology. Data will be gathered from (1) satellite image analyses to give a characterization of recent forest cover and landscape pattern changes, (2) spatially explicit analyses that combine statistical regression with geographic information systems (GIS) to provide a linkage to possible social and biophysical factors associated with that change, and 3) various interview and survey methods to provide contextual information on the sociospatial and institutional relations of power surrounding forest access and use in the study area, and to compare local perceptions of forest change processes with patterns revealed by remotely sensed data.
The results should contribute a unique spatio-scalar approach that combines social and biophysical considerations in the analysis of deforestation and conservation interventions in Africa. The results will questions standard paradigms surrounding the CBFM model and common-pool resources theory, and help to reconcile the promise and rhetoric of CBFM to reality, suggest improvements in the analysis and practice of CBFM, and raise policy and research questions that allow the search for alternatives to CBNRM where needed. The study will also increase the current knowledge in the land use and land cover change literature on the methodological challenges for integrating dominant paradigms in the social and natural sciences, and integrating social and biophysical data in explaining such change, and specifically demonstrate contributions of geographic political ecology to such literature. The study will also add to knowledge on the change processes taking place in the miombo biome of southern Africa. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
