Participation in the Caribbean: A Review of Grenada’s Forest Policy Process (2000)

Early forest policy in the tropics reflected the intentions of governments and their professional foresters, far more than the needs of people who live in or near forests. This anomalous legacy frequently remains today. With subsequent crises in land and timber supplies, such formal policy may have become submerged, or at least obfuscated, by piecemeal political decrees and the actions of powerful people. And more latterly, with the perception of tropical forest ‘crisis’ reaching international levels in the 1980s, global initiatives were set in train to develop formal policies. These policies were often written by foreign ‘experts’, based on international precepts. It is significant that none of these overlapping ‘eras’ of policy – the normative, the piecemeal, and the globalised – have been characterised by public engagement. 
This has been the case in Grenada. As a result, stakeholders do not have rights, responsibilities and incentives to manage forests well. To concerned individuals in the Forest Department and elsewhere, the evident failure of previous policies made it clear that any effective forest policy would have to   
be strongly linked to stakeholders’ values – rather than those of foresters, politicians or foreign consultants alone. Consequently a new era in forest policy – a participatory one – has emerged out of local need and imagination.

Area of interest: Grenada

Year: 2000