Management of non-timber forestry products extraction: Local institutions, ecological knowledge and market structure in South-Eastern Zimbabwe

Common-pool resources (CPRs), such as forests, water resources and rangelands, provide a wide variety of economic benefits to forest-fringe dwellers in semi-arid areas of southern Africa. However, the public nature and competition involved in the use of these goods, and weak enforcement of institutional arrangements governing their use may lead to resource degradation. Using survey data from four communities in south-eastern Zimbabwe for 2008 and 2009, this paper examines the extent to which forest degradation is driven by existing common property management regimes resource and user characteristics, ecological knowledge and marketing structure. A Principal Component Analysis indicates that the existence of agreed-upon rules governing usage (including costs of usage), enforcement of these rules, sanctions for rule violations that are proportional to the severity of rule violation, social homogeneity, and strong beliefs in ancestral spirits were the most important attributes determining effectiveness of local institutions in the management of CPRs. Empirical results from a regression analysis showed that resource scarcity, market integration, and infrastructural development lead to greater resource degradation, while livestock income, high ecological knowledge, older households, and effective local institutional management of the commons reduce resource degradation. The results suggest that there is need for adaptive local management systems that enhance ecological knowledge of users and regulates market structure to favour long-term livelihood securities of these forest-fringe communities.