Drivers of Community Participation in Participatory Forest Management; An Evidence of Kodera Forest in Kenya

Abstract

The present thirty-one percent of overall forest cover is not enough to conserve biological diversity globally and so the need to conserve the last global forests (Powlen et al., 2021). Kenya has experienced significant degradation of forest resources in the last 40 years. In 2005, the government passed a forest legislation that allows communities adjacent to forests to co-manage forests. This paper evaluated the driving force of community involvement in participatory forest management. The paper adopted a descriptive research design targeting forest-adjacent communities. A questionnaire and interview schedule were used for data collection. A pilot study was conducted, and research tools were carefully revised to ensure the validity and reliability of the content. The paper used Taro Yamane’s sampling formula to extract 255 respondents from a total of 671 households surrounding the forest. Quantitative data were evaluated using inferential statistics. The results were presented in tables and discussed appropriately. The results showed that 45.90% of the respondents are affiliated with one of the conservation user groups, while 54.1% of respondents were not affiliated with any Kodera Forest conservation groups. Based on Pearson’s chi-square test statistic (43.449 with p-value = 0.000), it was clear that there was a significant association between education level and perception of forest user group importance. Similarly, the chi-square results suggested that there is a statistically significant association between participation in conservation activities and respondents’ monthly expenditure at the conventional level of significance (α = 0.05).