Starting in 1994, Cameroon introduced legislative and market-based reforms to regulate the rights to use and benefit from the country’s rich rainforests. These reforms sought to balance public and private interest and integrate wider economic, cultural, and environmental perspectives. Today, more than 60 percent of Cameroon’s rainforest are under management systems that emphasize sustainability.  Biodiversity is better protected, illegal logging in managed areas has declined sharply, and the forest industry has restructured and adopted internally recognized forest management practices. 

To give greater momentum to and extract lessons from a decade of reform in Cameroon's forest sector, PROFOR supported the publishing and French translation of The Rainforests of Cameroon: Experience and Evidence from a Decade of Reform. The report, written by the World Bank's Africa Environment team, analyzes the process of forest sector reform in Cameroon: its phasing, technical, political, and economic drivers, achievements, shortcomings, and lessons learned.

Based on historical data, original research, and counterfactual analyses, the report describes how these reforms played out.  The book identifies which policies worked, which did not, and what can be improved. 

Working from the report, the team drew lessons for reform processes more broadly, of relevance to other sectors and regions.  Those lessons are captured in a PROFOR knowledge note entitled "Policy Reform Lessons: An Example from the Forestry Sector in Cameroon."