Access to Forest Products and Support for Conservation: a Case of Malava Forest, Kenya

Abstract

Many households are entirely dependent on natural capital for their livelihood activities, and forests, for a long time have provided this critical capital. Forest resources are important sources of livelihoods both for rural and urban dwellers across the world. As human beings have interacted with forest resources, in most cases the resultant scenario has been land degradation, conflicts, and deforestation. Conservation of these resources, therefore, has been and continues to be key in ensuring sustained livelihood support from forest resources. Actions to conserve forest resources have evolved over time in Kenya; from the colonial times when forest lands were rendered inaccessible to local communities, to post-colonial times with the Gazettement of part of the forest lands; with current frameworks characterized by participatory forest management. In all these efforts, as literature points out, the involvement of local communities by allowing them to exploit the resources and participate in decision-making always have had questionable outcome on conservation. This study focused on Malava forest adjacent communities’ access to forest products and cross-examined whether this interaction influenced their attitude and behaviour towards support for forest conservation. The study argued that access to forest products provides benefits to the communities which eventually engenders positive attitude and behaviour towards support for forest conservation. The study employed a cross-sectional survey research design and used systematic random sampling method to sample 169 respondents from the households surrounding Malava forest. The study findings show that access to forest products is influenced by household demographic characteristics such as distance to the forest, age, level of education, wealth, household size, gender and occupation. Contrary to empirical findings which have shown that dependence on forest resources adversely affects communities’ attitude and behaviour towards support for conservation, our analysis has shown that support for conservation in Malava forest is positively influenced by dependence on the forest for different products. Among others, the study recommends that income-generating activities should be diversified for the surrounding communities to discourage illegal activities that derail the conservation of the forest.