Community Forests in Gabon: How Do Local Communities Take Ownership?

Wildlife is a common asset to which the local community has the right to exploit. To achieve sustainable management of this resource, a community forest (CF) with a wildlife vocation has been set up as part of the "Sustainable management of wildlife and the bushmeat sector in Central Africa" project. Given the constraints faced by these community forests (CFs), we conducted a study to assess their governance in Gabon. Our aim was to examine whether the way they currently operate is conducive to their long-term survival and the integration of sustainable hunting. To do this, we constructed a SWOT matrix (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) to deter-mine their strengths and weaknesses, from which we carried out a factorial correspondence analysis (FCA) to identify potentially viable CFs. This enabled us to understand that most of the difficulties encountered by these CFs stem from the low level of appropriation of this concept by local communities, which is due to the low level of intervention by the forestry administration in raising awareness of CF management. This study shows that local communities must first take ownership of how CFs work so that they can better apply their success factors.