A postdoctoral research fellow at SNRE's International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research initiative, Lauren Persha, along with co-investigator and SNRE Professor and Associate Dean Arun Agrawal, have received a nearly $400,000 grant from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) to investigate the outcomes of Tanzania's ongoing forest management systems.
Forest resources provide subsistence products and cash income to millions of rural Tanzanians. However, forest cover has experienced rapid degradation and fragmentation in recent decades and is the focus of many conservation efforts.
A groundbreaking 12-year-old forest management program granted ownership and governance 
rights to villagers and provided a legal framework for communal land ownership; the program now affects nearly 20 percent of villages and more than 12 percent of forest area in the country and has been a model for similar programs in other developing countries.
Yet Tanzania's program has never been systematically analyzed to determine how improved livelihood, forest conditions and forest governance relate to each other. Persha's project will carry out that analysis.
"Ultimately, I hope the results will be useful in providing policymakers not only regionally in East Africa but across developing countries more generally with a set of information that is useful for crafting evidence-based policies that can more effectively facilitate positive outcomes across rural livelihoods, governance and forest conservation goals, or help to minimize trade-offs between them," Persha said.
Over three years, the SNRE team will work closely with a Tanzanian NGO, the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group, as well as forest department staff and villagers involved with forest management. The Tanzanian group will collect much of the data covering 64 forests, 130 villages and more than 5,500 households. Pasha plans to travel to Tanzania in the spring of 2011 to train field staff and lay the groundwork for data collection; she then expects to spend several weeks a year collecting data there as well. The Tanzanian researchers will travel to Ann Arbor for analysis and writing. Results will be incorporated in policy briefs and presented at a forest-management workshop in Dar es Salaam.
Persha's doctoral dissertation examined four sites in Tanzania in a similar way, but this project looks at forest management on a national scale.
"Questions surrounding forest use and governance – globally and particularly in tropical developing countries – are central to a number of important global environmental and long term sustainability issues, including those related to biodiversity and biodiversity loss, land use and land cover change, climate change, carbon sequestration and climate mitigation efforts, and important rural poverty and equity issues," Persha said. "Tanzania's coastal and montane forests are recognized as global biodiversity hotspots, while also serving as important regulators of ecosystem services nationally and locally, for instance water catchment and regulation services that are quite important in this semi-arid country."
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