Potential for co-management approaches to strengthen livelihoods of forest-dependent communities: a case study of the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Service, Kenya

A common, often unstated, assumption in the wide ranging literature advocating co-management approaches to management of forestry, and related natural resources, in developing countries is that co-management has the potential to improve the livelihood outcomes of forest-dependent communities. Consequently, co-management has gained wide acceptance among governments, development agencies and development practitioners as an alternative natural resources management strategy to the top-down or centralised government management approaches. However, many natural resource management scholars have conceptually narrowly focused their research, informed either by the literature on institutional design and evaluation or by the literature on livelihood outcomes per se, without explicitly acknowledging and rigorously examining possible linkages between the two. Thus, a major gap in the current literature on the evaluation of co-management institutional arrangements is the extent to which co-management can strengthen the livelihoods of the poor forest-dependent communities. This gap is addressed in this thesis by developing and testing an argument that well designed co-management arrangements have the potential to strengthen the livelihood outcomes of forest-dependent communities. A hybrid analytical framework was developed that situates the design criteria for co-management institutions in the broader context of the sustainable livelihood framework. It then uses this analytical framework to evaluate the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve (ASFR) co-management initiative in Kenya, based on a three-step process. First, the thesis provides an overview of current institutional arrangements for governance of the ASFR co-management regime. Second, it evaluates the extent to which these governance arrangements can be characterised as devolved collaborative governance, informed by Ostrom’s (1990) design principles and; third, it evaluates the extent to which the livelihood outcomes of forest-dependent communities which are formally participants in the co-management project, compared to adjacent forest-dependent communities outside the ambit of the co-management arrangement, have strengthened as a result of the ASFR co-management governance arrangements. The findings from this study demonstrate that institutional arrangements for ASFR co-management are relatively nascent and emerging because the governance arrangements for the ASFR co-management project cannot yet be characterised as fully devolved collaborative governance. Notwithstanding this, the findings reveal that participant forest-dependent communities in the co-management project had stronger livelihoods compared to forest-dependent communities not within the co-management scheme. Thus, the exploratory hypothesis is partially verified with qualifications. A key theoretical significance of the study is that it has conceptually and methodologically forged a link between the co-management discourse and the sustainable development discourse. Based on the study findings, an on-going evaluation of the ASFR co-management initiative is recommended to improve its future sustainability and that of the livelihoods of the communities that depend on it