title: Challenges for community-based forest management in the KoloAla site Manompana.
abstract: Following the IUCN 5th World Congress on Protected Areas in 2003, the then-President of Madagascar decided to increase the area of Madagascar's protected areas from 1.7 to 6 million ha. To combine the aims of protection and timber production, a new concept was developed through the establishment of community-based forest management (CBFM) sites, called KoloAla. However, experience shows that similar management transfers to communities in Madagascar have only been successful in a very few cases. We aimed to explore the success to be expected of this new approach in the particular case of the Manompana corridor at Madagascar's eastern coast. In a first step, the readiness of the corridor's resource users for CBFM has been analysed according to the seven resource users' attributes developed by Ostrom that predict an effective self-organized resource management. In a second step, we explored how KoloAla addresses known challenges of Madagascar's CBFM. Analyses lead in a rather sober conclusion. Although KoloAla attempts to address the goals of poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and timber production under a single umbrella, it does so in a rather non-innovative way. Challenges with regard to the state's environmental governance, agricultural inefficiency and thus deforestation remain unsolved.
authors: ETH Zurich-USYS, Zurich, Switzerland. urechz@gmail.com
authors: Zora Lea
authors: ZL
authors: Urech
authors: Jean-Pierre
authors: JP
authors: Sorg
authors: Hans Rudolph
authors: HR
authors: Felber
mesh_terms: D003256:Community Participation; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D016468:Forestry / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008270:Madagascar