Book Description
During the 1994 forest policy reform in Cameroon, NGOs, World Bank (WB) and Members of Parliament (MPs) were believed to be strongly influential. However, their leverage has never been evaluated. It is to fill this empirical gap that this thesis sets out to elucidate the influence of NGOs, WB and MPs on the Cameroon Forestry Law (CFL). The study combined the inductive and deductive research approaches, building its theoretical framework on the struggle between the structuralist and intentionalist divides of the structuration theory of Giddens, the new institutional economics, and the governance and representation theories. It adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods and tools drawing on a set of 30 semi-standardized interviews and 95 questionnaires. Data analysis was performed using four data analysis techniques: content analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis and Pearson ́s chi square analysis with SPSS 15.0 version. The empirical findings of this research showed that NGOs exerted some influence on the community forestry deliberation, while the Bank had a great leverage on the same regulation. Both WB and MPs had a substantial impact on the log export and local wood processing regime whereas MPs held a great influence on the logging licences allocation system and the contract duration clauses. The study also identified 18 significant contextual and agential factors of influence of NGOs, WB and MPs. These factors tested approximately 55% of the theoretical framework of the study. Contextual factors accounted for about 60% of influence processes meanwhile agential factors held nearly 53% of the variance explained. However, only 15 of these factors are still relevant to the current policy arena in Cameroon and were embedded into the constructed model. The results of this study are in line with those obtained in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Bolivia and Costa Rica where forest policy reforms occured at the same period with Cameroon.