Lessons on Forest and Wildlife Sector Integration in Zambia

Over the years, there have been calls for transferring management and resource rights of natural resources to local communities. This type of devolution is expected to promote incentives for local conservation as well as reduce the management burden for the government. In the 1990s, the National Parks and Wildlife Policy (1998) and the Forest Action Plan (1997) acknowledged a need for community participation in forest and wildlife management. The government of Zambia first experimented with resource rights devolution with the Administrative Management Design (ADMADE) program in the 1980s. ADMADE attempted to empower communities with decision-making, benefit-sharing, and conservation responsibilities in the Luangwa Valley, a site of international biodiversity importance. By the 1990s, the model was formalized with the Wildlife Policy of 1998, which recognized the CBNRM model. Subsequently, the Zambia Wildlife Act 12 of 1998 facilitated the formation of Community Resources Boards (CRB) with legal rights to resource management. In parallel to wildlife sector reforms, the Forest Action Plan of 1997 recognized the need for community rights devolution in the forest sector. The subsequent Forest Policy of 1998 provided for a Joint Forest Management (JFM) model that allowed private entity participation in forest reserve management. However, the JFM was never implemented beyond a few pilot sites, and the concept of community engagement in forest management was not pursued. Almost 20 years later, recognizing rampant deforestation across Zambia, particularly in non-protected areas, the Forest Act of 2015 and subsequent Regulations of 2018 laid out a process for communities to establish community forest management groups (CFMG) and register for management of forest areas (CFMA) through the community forest management (CFM) model. Zambia now has 88 CRBs and over 200 CFMGs, each with management rights over complementary resources that sit on the same land or at least within the same chiefdom. Yet there are limited formal mechanisms for these groups to collaborate and coordinate, and indeed there are incentives for these groups and sectors to continue to operate in their own silos. The remainder of this brief describes the principal challenges in enhancing coordination between the forest and wildlife sectors through the lens of CRBs and CFMGs. The following section describes the incentives both in legislation and practice that restrict coordinated responses through CRBs and CFMGs. They reflect tensions: 1) between state and customary institutions; 2) between communities and their customary leaders; 3) between departments within the state. The Wildlife Act references the role of the CRB beyond wildlife management, but in practice, the management of other resources, including forests, water, minerals, and land, falls outside of the mandate of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW). The CFMGs and CRBs operate almost entirely on customary land, which is administered by 288 formally recognized chiefs from across Zambia's ethnically diverse tribes. Customary land covers the majority of the country (technically 94 percent); however, the state has management (and in some cases administrative) responsibilities over large areas (such as National Parks and Forest Reserves). Land under chiefdom direct administration is likely closer to 60 percent of the country. Each chiefdom has its own administrative structure, composed at the lowest level of village headpersons, whose roles are roughly defined in the 1972 Villages Act and include keeping a register of village residents and making recommendations on land allocation to the chief.