How to Make Policy Research on Public Assets Management of Forest and Wildlife Sectors Successful?

Abstract

The situation of policy research in Tanzania and its contribution to the policy making, leaves much to be desired. The paper suggests that government investment in supply-driven research studies is of critical importance in order to know and understand fundamental issues and what really is taking place in forest and wildlife reserves as well as forest and wildlife management as a whole. There has been much preference for the use of stakeholders’ recommendations as inputs into policy making process instead of using research studies. The stakeholders’ recommendations have been used without subjecting them to validity test. A systematic validation test could help to double check the quality of issued stakeholders’ recommendations. The practice in Tanzania of using stakeholders’ recommendations as a direct policy input has contributed to weak policy provisions, and largely policy disjunctions. This is particularly prevalent in forest and wildlife management as there has been an increase in human-wildlife conflicts, deforestation, forest degradation, animal extinction and poaching.  It is also evident that bureaucrats’ way of handling research recommendations which differ from their own is amongst the bottlenecks of policy making in Tanzania, and this eventually undermines the value of policy research.

Keywords: Policy Research, Effective Policy, Forest and Wildlife Management, Tanzania

DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/10-4-05

Publication date: April 30^th 2020