Forest Policies and Forest Fringe Households’ Resilience against Poverty in Participatory Forest Management Sites in Burkina Faso

Abstract

This paper uses an original dataset that was built upon extensive surveys covering 300 forest fringe households on the main participatory forest management (PFM) sites in Burkina Faso. We then combine simultaneously the seminal approach of Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (1984) monetary poverty indices and the Béné’s (2013) approach of resilience on costs (expenditures) analysis, so as to emphasize forests fringe households’ resilience against poverty mainly by capturing the induced changes by the 1998 forest policy, in these households’ abilities to cope with poverty. The major outcomes are: (i) forest income sources remain the most dominant in households’ total income for 1997 and 2004; (ii) both poverty rate and poverty gap decrease from 1997 to 2004. This decline in the level of poverty is mainly explained by the households’ coping strategies through the development of investments and others expenditures (agricultural equipment, livestock, poultry, trade, crafts activities and processing of NTFPs) so that to cope with poverty; (iii) forest fringe households are resilient against poverty in PFM sites. The main environmental policy implication of this study should be to update the levels of the instruments of the environmental policy (forest), twenty years after the implementation of the 1998 forest policy so that to reinforce forest households’ resilience and forest sustainability.