Governing Forests for Provisioning Services: The Example of Honey Production in Southwest Ethiopia

Provisioning services are major environmental services provided by forests. Especially in tropical countries, the livelihoods of local people often partly depend on a range of timber and non-timber forest products. The governance arrangements concerning such locally valued environmental services are complex and include multilevel centres of authority. They do not only concern policies and regulations formulated by national and international organisations but also local norms and rules for formulating and implementing a set of management practices to organise and control the access to resources and their markets. This chapter presents a case study of the role of forest provisioning services for local communities and how this is reflected in a dynamic and multilevel system of forest resource governance. The case study concerns the production of honey in the mountain forests of Southwest Ethiopia. Based on experiences of an NTFP development programme and related field studies and literature, this chapter first describes the forests and livelihood conditions in this region, emphasising the multiple environmental services provided by forests to local people. Next, it specifies the role of forests for honey production and the different governance arrangements for its production and marketing. Local people actively manage both bees and tree vegetation; these practices have gradually been intensified. Beekeeping has not only contributed to forest conservation but also to the development of a forested landscape consisting of a mosaic of natural and adapted forest types. The governance complex is increasingly impacted by external systems of environmental governance. Such new arrangements should complement and build up on local governance arrangements rather than compete with them.