Community participation is a process by which a community mobilizes its resources, initiatives and takes responsibility for its own development activities and share decision making for and implementation of other development programmes for the overall of its health status.
In PFM implementation, gender participations have more significant and great role in forest management. It is intended to address real development needs of communities in the district including women. Both men and women community representatives have participated in the process of formulating PFM design, plan and management, particularly during identification and prioritization of forest users interventions. Such local community participation will continue to be central to implementation, monitoring and management stages.
The initial focus on involving community in the in government programmes for reforestation and forest protection has also gradually evolved towards more devolution of decision making power and more active use of forest resource by local communities. If community participation is to be enhanced, greater emphasis should be placed on understanding the perspectives of the different stakeholders.
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Historically, the relationship between members of local communities and the institutions mandated with natural resource management has been characterized by suspicion, punitive measures and limited dialogue. There is need for forums where government officials and community representatives can discuss their expectations of increased community participation. For most of the time, people have been participating in the development of their own cultures through the sharing of tasks and responsibilities in their own small communities. From degraded forest rehabilitation perspective, participation can be defined as the involvement of the community in conserving of forest areas on each forest rehabilitation activities at planning, implementation and the evaluation stages (Eshetu et al., 2014).
The World Bank (1996) defines the concept of participation as a process through which stakeholder’s influence and share control over development initiatives, decisions and resources that affect them. According to the definition of the United Nations (1975), people’s participation entails three interrelated, but distinct processes: (1) the involvement of the local people in decision making (2) the responding of their contribution to development programs and (3) their participation in sharing the benefits from the development process.
Level of Participation:- the degree/extent to which people involvement in forest management activities.
Perception:-Views (positive or negative) of people towards PFM in forest management.
Areas of communities on forest Participation:-the area starts from inception of project activity to the monitoring stage of activities. Idea generation (designing), planning, decision-making and implementation are areas where the local community involves. Implementation stage comprises activities such as nursery, plantation and controlling/protecting.
Forest:- Forest is one of the most essential kinds of resources that human beings and other animals depend on. It regulates environmental and ecological changes in which soil, climate, rain etc. are in the good existence in sustainable condition. Whether it is private or public property, forest is the nationally and globally natural treasure. This means whatever the resource the people have: the existence of forest is decisive (Terefe, 2003).
According to FAO forest resource assessment (FRA, 2010) land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and canopy cover of more than 10% or trees able to research reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use.
Forest tenure:- is the forest holding system, which is defined by the rule and regulation with the government in the forest block allocation contract document.
