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‘Centralize!’ ‘Decentralize!’ ‘No, centralize. We need more control!’,
‘We must decentralize! Centralizing is not working.’ Organizations
and agencies around the world have gone through reversing this
pendulum swing time and again, in an effort to improve management
or to make their programs more effective and efficient. But
they find it difficult to truly know which aspects to control at which
level. So when they arrive at one or the other pole, problems and
unintended consequences become evident and they swing back.
The same is true for the way governments and agencies handle
forest and tree resources. Many countries in the past, and even
today, have nationalized ownership and management of forestland
or even of specific tree species. They often do this with the expectation
that they will have more control, increased revenue and in
some cases longer term sustainability. But there is a multitude of
examples of centralizing not reaching these goals and the resource
finally becoming so degraded that it is no longer of much interest
to the central authority.
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