The politics of expertise in participatory forestry: a case from Tanzania

• Specific forms of knowledge that create expertise at the local level are critical to shaping patterns of participation and access to benefits in Participatory Forest Management.
• The construction of expertise is an important aspect of professionalization within participatory natural resource management interventions.
• Expertise is brought into struggles taking place over access to benefit from participatory forest management, including the instrumental use of specific knowledge.
• The standard inclusion of forest management plans within participatory natural resource management plans should be recognized as political artefacts of governance with significant roles in the struggles taking place within these strategies.

In this paper, we show how the framing of a community-based forest management (CBFM) intervention implies the professionalization of forest management and the privileging of certain forms of knowledge in a village in Tanzania. We describe how the framing of CBFM in technical and procedural terms, and the subsequent construction of expertise by implementers through training, combine with existing signifiers of social stratification to shape struggles over participation and access to benefits from forest use and management. We also describe how the perceived necessity of expertise is not questioned by village residents, only the exclusive and anti-democratic consequences of the way it comes to be reproduced. Based on our study, we call for a careful reconsideration of the framing of participatory forestry approaches as professionalization to strike a balance between the need for expertise and the costs and potential excluding effects associated with meeting this need.