Transgressing Boundaries: Gendered Spaces, Species, and Indigenous Forest Management in Uganda
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Date
2005
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Publisher
Tropical Resource Management Papers
Abstract
Uganda is a country known for its extensive tropical high forests. It is estimated that 24
percent (5 million ha) of Uganda’s land is under forest cover (MWLE 2001). Local
people are known to greatly depend on these forest resources (Cunningham 1996).
Uganda’s forest resources are thus expected to contribute to poverty eradication,
wealth creation and the modernisation of the country (MWLE 2001). However, past
forest management policies in Uganda led to increasing State control over the
approximately 700 forest reserves that cover about 30 percent of all forested area in the
country (Ndemere 1997; Kayanja and Byarugaba 2001). For decades the Government
has taken a strong conservationist stance and its main goals in managing the reserves
were to conserve these forests and generate revenues for the State. The Forest
Department, a State agency, controlled and managed about 61percent of the total forest
area under State control, with the main objectives of producing timber and providing of
environmental services, presumably for the benefit of the nation as a whole (Howard
1991). It issued and regulated permits and concessions for the harvest of forest
products. Only a small percentage (less than 20 percent) of the revenues was reinvested
in forest conservation. Moreover, the government imposed restrictions on local
people’s collection of forest products (Uganda Government 1988; Kiwanuka 1991).
Functionaries of the State Forest Department considered that conservation involved
protecting forest against people rather than managing forests for people’s needs (UFD
1997). Successive forest policies have restricted local people’s rights to enter, use and
manage forest reserves in the name of forest conservation, leaving a limited number of
non-gazetted forest areas that cover a total of about 20,000 km2 in which local
communities exercise relatively independent use and management. In addition to the
forest reserves, private forest lands constitute about 70 percent of all forested
landscapes in Uganda. The use of these forests is formally overseen by local
governments and communities, but little attention has been given by the government to
developing forest management policies for these lands. With such a state-dominated
approach to forest management, local communities’ forest management practices,
which are primarily geared towards local subsistence and cultural values, have been
largely ignored. Policy makers generally overlook local management approaches and
rarely contemplate them in policies geared towards forested landscape management.
Description
Keywords
Transgressing Boundaries, Gendered spaces, Species, Indigenous Forest Management
Citation
Nabanoga, G. (2005). Transgressing boundaries. Gendered Spaces, Species, and Indigenous Forest Management in Uganda (No. 60). [sn].