Forest governance and social context shape ecosystem service views in West Africa

In one of the most ambitious studies of its kind ever conducted in West Africa, researchers surveyed more than 2,600 households across nine forest patches in Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon to answer a deceptively simple question: who perceives which benefits from small forests, and why? The findings, published in the journal Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, reveal that neither ecology nor demographics alone explains how rural communities value their forests. Instead, the study demonstrates that the type of governance under which a forest sits—whether it is owned by a family, held sacred by custom, or managed collectively by a community—profoundly moderates how local stakeholders perceive the ecosystem services those forests deliver.

Forest patches in agricultural landscapes have long been the neglected children of ecosystem service research. While vast, contiguous tropical forests have attracted the lion’s share of scientific attention across Sub-Saharan Africa, the small, fragmented stands of trees scattered through farmland—often just one to ten square kilometers in area—have been largely overlooked. Yet these patches, defined in the study as areas with at least 30 percent tree cover, tree heights of five meters or more, and areas between one and ten square kilometers, are biodiversity-rich reservoirs that sit at the immediate doorstep of millions of rural households. In a region where nearly 500 million people depend heavily on natural resources for their livelihoods, understanding what these small forests provide, and to whom, is far from academic.

The research team, led by Paule Pamela Tabi Eckebil and including Matthias Bürgi, Felicia O. Akinyemi, Denis Jean Sonwa, and Chinwe Ifejika Speranza, drew their study sites from a remarkable regional inventory encompassing more than 400,000 forests outside protected areas. From this vast dataset, they purposively selected nine forest patches spanning two distinct agroecological zones: four in the Tropical Warm and Humid rainforest zone and five in the Tropical Warm and Subhumid Guinea savannah. Crucially, the selection also captured three fundamentally different governance regimes. Family-owned forests, controlled by family heads who decide on access and use, included sites such as Agou in Togo and Ikot in Nigeria. Sacred forests, governed through customary and culturally rooted institutions where religious beliefs and social norms enforced by traditional authorities dictate use, included Koui in Togo and Kouvizoun in Benin. Community-based forests, managed collectively through management committees, included Iko in Nigeria and Ngam-Kondomeyos in Cameroon.

The scale of the fieldwork is itself notable. Between September 2022 and February 2023, enumerators conducted household surveys across communities neighboring the nine patches, reaching a total of 2,621 households. Sample sizes were calculated using Cochran’s formula at a 90 percent confidence interval with a five percent margin of error, yielding a target of roughly 271 households per forest, which the team increased to a minimum of 300 where population density allowed. Enumerators were positioned along walking routes on both sides of village paths, approaching each block of houses individually to minimize clustering bias and ensure that participants were evenly distributed throughout each community. Surveys were administered in French or English, and sometimes orally in local languages, with back-translation checks applied to verify consistency.

The analytical architecture of the study is rigorous and multilayered. Local perceptions of forest benefits were systematically mapped onto the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services version 5.1, ensuring that what villagers reported could be translated into internationally recognized categories of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. Chi-square tests of homogeneity assessed whether sociodemographic profiles differed across sites. Friedman tests compared rankings across the three ecosystem service categories. Binary logistic regression, with eight sociodemographic predictors including gender, age group, marital status, residency, education level, main occupation, household size, and the number of economically active household members, modeled which factors predicted perceived forest benefits. Kruskal-Wallis H tests with Dunn-Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons evaluated the magnitude of perceptions, and a multivariate Gaussian generalized linear model incorporating all interactions between governance type and sociodemographic factors tested how institutional context moderates perception patterns.

The sociodemographic portrait that emerged is telling. More than 70 percent of respondents in each agroecological zone were male household heads, a reflection of the patrilineal systems dominating the study areas, where men act as household spokespersons. Nearly 40 percent of respondents had attended secondary school, more than half were farmers, and most had lived in their communities for over twenty years. Average household size was six members, with roughly three children per household and up to five economically active members in larger families.

The study’s hypotheses about perception hierarchies were grounded in a straightforward material logic: because provisioning services—forest foods, timber, fuelwood, medicinal plants, and non-timber forest products—offer tangible, daily, physical contact, local stakeholders were expected to rate them higher than the intangible regulating services such as carbon storage and climate buffering, or cultural services such as spiritual enrichment and aesthetic appreciation. The region’s forests, fragmented over decades by agriculture, population growth, and land-use change into patches of varying size and connectivity, deliver a mosaic of benefits whose visibility to local users varies with how directly those users can touch them.

What makes this study a genuine advance is its insistence that access rules matter as much as material dependence. African forest tenure is a palimpsest of colonial and customary law: most forests remain formally state-owned, yet customary systems persist and actually govern access across the continent, with customary tenure covering roughly three-quarters of Africa’s land. Secure tenure, prior research has shown, encourages long-term forest management, while unclear rights correlate with weaker stewardship and diminished willingness to invest in protection or restoration. By treating governance type not as background context but as an active moderator interacting with gender, age, education, and occupation, the study tested whether the same demographic profile produces different perceptions under different institutional arrangements. The conceptual framework posited that stakeholders with fewer restrictions on forest access would be more likely to perceive declines in ecosystem service availability over time—on the reasoning that familiarity, born of frequent use, sharpens awareness of loss. Perceived change was measured over a five-year window from 2018 to 2022, a period long enough to capture meaningful dynamics while acknowledging the inherent limitations of memory decay.

The methodological choice to foreground social preferences rather than biophysical measurements is itself a quiet provocation. Quantitative spatial approaches have dominated ecosystem service assessment, but their application is hampered by chronic data scarcity in the region. Local stakeholders, the authors argue, possess intimate knowledge of their landscapes that allows them to identify key forest ecosystem services more accurately than external evaluations ever could. Making forest management participatory and inclusive, the study contends, is not merely an ethical nicety but an epistemic necessity: the voices and needs of the people who actually use these forests must anchor any policy meant to sustain them.

The implications ripple outward. For conservation practitioners and policymakers in Western Africa and beyond, the message is that a one-size-fits-all forest strategy is doomed to misfire. A medicinal plant harvesting program designed for a community-based forest with a management committee cannot simply be transplanted to a sacred forest where traditional authorities enforce norms through religious belief, nor to a family-owned woodland where a single household head controls decisions. The study’s evidence that sociodemographic variables such as education—which shapes cognitive framing—and age—which shapes lived experience—interact differently with governance regimes suggests that interventions must be tuned simultaneously to who people are and to the institutional rules that govern their relationship with the forest. As agricultural mosaics continue to expand across the Guinea coast, the fate of the region’s remaining forest patches, and the food security, incomes, and spiritual wellbeing they quietly sustain, will depend on governance systems that recognize these layered realities.