Can Shared Power Save Ethiopia’s Forests? A Decade of Community Governance Put to the Test

In the highland forests of western Ethiopia, an experiment in sharing power over trees has been running quietly for more than a decade, and its results are now coming into focus. A new study published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation examines the fate of participatory forest management in the Gargeda State Forest, where the international NGO Farm Africa helped establish thirty Forest User Groups in 2013. By 2024, only ten of those groups remained active. That attrition rate alone might suggest failure, but the research, led by Zelalem Telila, Abayineh Amare, and Teferi Tolera, paints a more nuanced picture: a governance model that has demonstrably built community awareness and commitment while struggling against institutional neglect, gender exclusion, and the slow erosion of external support. The findings arrive at a critical moment, as Ethiopia and much of the tropics grapple with how to halt forest degradation without locking local people out of the landscapes they depend upon.

Participatory forest management, often abbreviated as PFM, rests on a deceptively simple idea: decentralize authority over forest resources by granting communities formal rights and responsibilities to use and protect them. In theory, this aligns conservation incentives with livelihood needs, replacing the adversarial dynamic between state forest guards and local users with a cooperative contract. In practice, the model’s success hinges on a web of enabling conditions—legal recognition, technical capacity, transparent benefit sharing, and sustained institutional backing—that can dissolve quietly when donors move on or governments change priorities. The Gargeda study set out to measure exactly these dynamics, treating PFM not as a fixed policy prescription but as an adaptive governance strategy whose performance must be continually assessed and adjusted.

The researchers employed a mixed-methods design that combined quantitative surveys of 324 Forest User Group members with key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and reviews of official documents. This triangulation allowed them to assess governance performance, socio-economic outcomes, enabling conditions, and barriers across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The survey instrument probed awareness, participation, satisfaction with benefit sharing, and willingness to engage in conservation activities, while the qualitative components captured the institutional history of the groups and the political context in which they operate. The result is one of the more comprehensive assessments of PFM performance in the Ethiopian highlands, offering both a diagnostic of what has gone wrong and a template for what could be repaired.

The headline numbers reveal a striking asymmetry between awareness and inclusion. On the positive side, 85 percent of surveyed community members demonstrated high awareness of participatory forest management and its objectives, suggesting that the core message of shared stewardship has taken root. Transparency in enforcement scored a moderate 62 percent, indicating that rules are reasonably visible in their application even if not perfectly so. Perhaps most encouraging for the model’s future, 83 percent of respondents expressed willingness to participate in conservation training, and 53 percent said they would join forest patrols. These figures point to a reservoir of collective commitment that persists despite a decade of institutional turbulence—a finding the authors treat as the foundation upon which any revival of the program must be built.

Yet the same data expose deep structural weaknesses. Women’s participation in the Forest User Groups stood at just 15.6 percent, a figure that undermines both the equity goals of participatory governance and its practical effectiveness, since women in rural Ethiopia are often primary users of forest products such as fuelwood. Satisfaction with benefit sharing reached only 48 percent, meaning roughly half of the members felt the rewards of participation did not justify their investment of time and labor. This dissatisfaction matters because benefit distribution is the engine of the PFM bargain: communities accept restrictions on use in exchange for a fair share of the returns. When that exchange falters, compliance tends to erode, and the informal extraction that PFM was designed to regulate can resume beneath the surface of formal governance.

The institutional evaluation was equally mixed. Respondents rated policy and legal frameworks at a moderate 60 percent, reflecting Ethiopia’s generally supportive statutory environment for community forestry. But planning and implementation each scored only 40 percent, revealing a gap between what the law permits and what actually happens on the ground. The authors attribute this implementation deficit to a cluster of interlocking barriers: the withdrawal of NGO support that had originally organized and trained the groups, weak technical capacity within communities to develop management plans and conduct inventories, poor coordination among government agencies with overlapping mandates, and political instability that disrupted institutional continuity. In the absence of external facilitation, many of the thirty original groups simply ceased functioning, their bylaws unenforced and their collective activities abandoned.

One of the study’s most interesting findings concerns the friction between statutory and customary rules. Ethiopia’s forests have long been governed in part by customary institutions—traditional authorities, communal norms, and inherited practices that regulate access to resources. Participatory forest management introduced a parallel statutory structure of user groups, committees, and formal bylaws, and in Gargeda the two systems have not always aligned. Where customary and formal rules conflicted, enforcement became ambiguous and legitimacy suffered. The authors identify this tension as a persistent barrier, but also implicitly as an opportunity: governance arrangements that deliberately integrate customary authority rather than competing with it may prove more durable than those imposed as purely statutory creations. This insight resonates with a broader literature on adaptive governance, which emphasizes that effective institutions must fit the social and cultural contexts in which they operate.

Against these challenges, the study identified clear enabling factors that sustained the ten surviving groups. Strong NGO facilitation during the formative years provided training, organizational templates, and mediation between communities and government. Community-developed bylaws gave groups locally legitimate rules that members understood and could enforce among themselves. Youth engagement emerged as a particularly valuable asset, injecting energy into patrols and planting activities and offering a generational bridge that could carry the model forward. These success factors suggest that the PFM approach in Gargeda did not fail on its own terms; rather, it was starved of the sustained support needed to mature. The distinction is crucial for policymakers, because it implies that the model remains viable if the institutional scaffolding is rebuilt rather than abandoned.

The implications extend well beyond a single forest in western Ethiopia. Ethiopia has lost a substantial share of its original forest cover over the past century, and remaining state forests like Gargeda face continuing pressure from agricultural expansion, livestock grazing, and fuelwood harvesting. Participatory forest management has been promoted across the country and much of sub-Saharan Africa as a way to reconcile conservation with rural livelihoods, and the Gargeda findings offer a candid assessment of what that promise requires. The authors conclude that long-term success and wider replication depend on sustained institutional backing, technical and financial capacity building, and genuinely inclusive participation—particularly of women and youth, whose current marginalization weakens both the fairness and the functional capacity of the groups. Without these investments, the model risks becoming a paper framework: legally recognized on paper, hollow in practice.

What makes this study compelling is its refusal to offer either a eulogy or a celebration. The data show a governance experiment that has preserved community commitment through a decade of adversity, achieved meaningful awareness and transparency, and yet fallen short on the inclusion and benefit-sharing mechanisms that give participatory models their moral and practical force. The 83 percent willingness to undergo conservation training is not a trivial statistic; it represents hundreds of individuals ready to invest labor in a collective enterprise, waiting for institutions capable of organizing them. The 15.6 percent female participation is equally telling, a measure of how much human capital the current arrangement wastes. As Ethiopia considers scaling community-based forest governance to meet national restoration and climate commitments, the Gargeda experience stands as both warning and guide: decentralization is necessary but insufficient, and the difference between thriving and abandoned Forest User Groups lies less in the design of the model than in the persistence of the support that surrounds it.

Subject of Research: Participatory forest management and community-based forest governance in Gargeda State Forest, Ethiopia

Article Title: Participatory Forest Management as an adaptive strategy for sustainable forest governance in Gargeda State Forest, Ethiopia

Article References: Telila, Z., Amare, A., & Tolera, T. (2026). Participatory Forest Management as an adaptive strategy for sustainable forest governance in Gargeda State Forest, Ethiopia. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(6), e0000251. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000251

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000251

Keywords: participatory forest management, Ethiopia, forest governance, community forestry, Forest User Groups, adaptive governance, benefit sharing, women's participation, NGO facilitation, forest degradation, customary institutions, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation