Chapter VI. Conclusions, Lessons Learned, and Next Steps for TBNRM

A. Conclusions

The conclusion is that natural resource management is first and foremost a matter of national sovereignty. Good natural resource management comes from strong capacity and plans and programs at national and decentralized levels within a national context. Weak national capacities cannot be joined to create a strong regional or transboundary process. Added to this is the realization that national capacity is more than just within a forest agency. Capacity is in political will, in agencies at national and decentralized levels and their inter-linkages, and in the community institutions that live around and interact with the natural resources. Capacity building is needed at all levels.

Forces leading to deforestation also are important actors, and so the agricultural and industrial policies and their incentives need to be included in the conservation process. Agricultural decisions may be influenced by national policies, but local guidelines and by-laws at the village level are equally important. The number of actors is large—and all have an important role to play.

“Transboundary-ism” adds an extra dimension on top of the above, but cannot replace it. TBNRM needs all the national policies and programs to be in place, with compatibility and interaction across boundaries.

A second set of conclusions is that the time is ripe for TBNRM processes and therefore TBNRM Areas leading from those processes. Policies are increasingly conducive to regional cooperation. The pattern of change taking place in forest sectors (new institutions and laws and programs), while chaotic at one extreme, does offer opportunity to build regional and TBNRM processes into the changes themselves.

The final comment to make here is that while CBBP has made good progress, this has been a slow and steady process. Rushing would not have helped, and would not have allowed the social and institutional ownership—a crucial political capital in negotiating really strong cross-border protocols—to come about. Awareness, interaction, tests and trials, cross-border meetings at all levels have been part of this process. Management plan formats, for instance, needed elaboration; CFM needed approval; districts needed empowerment to interact. All of these components were and are important stepping stones.

B. Lessons learned

The lessons outlined below derive from the analyses in the preceding chapter and from the three conclusions discussed above.

1. National capacity is essential. Capacity is in human resources—with resources to intervene, with understanding and awareness, and with the empowerment to interact in a TBNRM process.
2. This capacity must include capacity for national conservation. There is no point in joining two weak conservation partners. There is merit in bringing together two partners with fairly equal capacities if they understand their national conservation agendas and the potential benefits of TBNRM.
3. This stresses the point that if there is no need for TBNRM, TBNRM will not work—or be an empty (and expensive) shell. TBNRM interaction costs money and time. If there is no agenda, there is a waste of money and time. TBNRM is fueled by output- and result-oriented planning.
4. In the MSBF case, similar problems and solutions were recognized by both parties—by local people, local agencies, political and sectoral leaders at national and district levels. It takes time to build that level of constituency for conservation—and further, to build cross-borders collaboration in conservation.
5. TBNRM in its first stage is ensuring that national resource management is done in a compatible way on both sides of the border. In the MSBF case this includes logging regimes and similar patterns of people supporting and achieving empowerment through JFM/CFM. Policies and implementation of policies need to be the same on all sides of the border.
6. An extra level of TBNRM is in cooperating by following similar methods. Cooperation in reserve demarcation, in CFM training, and in resource mapping are all examples of forest management cooperation in CBBP. Sharing experiences in agricultural development, in fuel-efficient stoves and beekeeping are examples of socioeconomic cooperation in CBBP. These cooperative efforts involve different actors and therefore reinforce cooperation at all levels—agencies as well as people.
7. TBNRM is a sub-set of broader regionalism. There is a need to foster regional- as well as site-level conservation cooperation. Regionalism—for example, in terms of support from customs officials, in terms of forest ministers, in terms of national policies, and in terms of Regional Agreements such as the EAC—is an important ingredient for TBNRM.
8. Finally, the long-term success of the TBNRM initiative will depend on the success of conservation at the national level. If local people are opposed to forest conservation and persuade leaders to withdraw support for CBBP and for TBNRM in MSBF, then the effort will fail. People want resources. Finding ways for sustainable resource use is the essential ingredient for success. For us in CBBP it is finding how to allow harvesting of trees other than the still scarce podo. If we cannot do that and do it soon, we will fail. With TBNRM, we have two heads working together, which is better than one alone.

C. Next steps

This final sub-section outlines the next steps to develop both sustainable conservation and a sustainable TBNRM culture around the MSBF site. They include those steps necessary for conservation action at the national level, as well as those necessary to secure more permanent TBNRM actions. The analysis above has highlighted several important issues that need to be addressed in order to promote the sustainable management of cross-border forest ecosystems. These issues can be summarized in the following clusters:

A) Broad policy issues. This is the development of an adequate enabling environment (Objective A in the Project Logframe in the Annex. Several of these steps are contained in ongoing workplans—especially in the contracted activity on policy analysis through ACTS and IUCN.

• Inconsistency in national forestry and other sectoral policies and practices;
• Transboundary linkages to be supported in new forest legislation;⁹
• Need for increased horizontal institutional interaction especially at the district level, to enhance integrated resource planning and sustainable utilization;
• Need for proper valuation processes for forests and forest resources;
• Inadequate policy analysis (including incentives issues) capacity to identify problem areas; and
• Need to build capacity of district and lower local governments to enact by-laws.

B) Broad reserve management

• This is initially at the national level but with shared processes leading to similar goals. For example, rules of nature reserve core areas—such as the inventory process to look at potential off-takes—should be similar.
• The basis of management will be the General Management Plan (GMP), toward which the project and partners are working (see B1 in the Logframe in the Annex).
• Such a GMP would also highlight the ICDP linkages with alternative resource use and alternative income generation (AIG) strategies (see B2 and B3 in the Logframe).
• Timber harvesting for local people, within a sustainable use system will be essential.

C) Community forest management

• There is a need to move both the enabling guideline processes for CFM/JFM (from headquarters levels to the levels where actual implementation takes place) and the implementation of these agreements on the ground.
• Much of the activity will be around sustainable use mechanisms for key resources, but also building in responsibilities for resource conservation. These mechanisms must be similar on both sides of the border.

D) Transboundary processes

• Identifying the key comparative advantages of TBNRM approaches in the MSBF area;
• Developing protocols at different levels to provide for cross-border management;
• Maintaining linkages at different levels and highlighting areas of mutual benefit, sending these areas upward to build a core of support for TBNRM at the policy level; and
• Feeding these lessons and experiences into regional bodies such as EAC.

9. The new Forest Bill in Kenya has a specific article enabling the Chief Conservator to enter into Cross-Border Management Plans and cross-border planning for forest products. (See the Regional Overview in this volume for more information).