Mitigating and Managing Regional Geo-environmental Hazards within a Decentralisation Transition in Cameroon

The management of natural hazards in Cameroon is currently executed by some ministerial and inter ministerial institutions and observatories whose means and methods are stipulated by centralised texts and decisions. The eminent decentralisation of the administration of Cameroon calls for a revisit and reformulation of the texts and institutions that cater for regional geo-environmental hazards. The double justification is that such innovation peters out the overlap in role-execution by the existing criss-crossing institutions. It equally sets a region-catastrophe-institution compliance scale for specific institutions to be region specific by taking into consideration regional geoenvironmental hazard differentiation. It would be a sham if the status and functions of current institutions are exported into the would-be regions, and especially so because their hazards do not portray a national spatio-temporal uniformity. The hypothesis of this paper is that, the current institutions are too centralised to be successful in serving a pragmatic decentralised regional administration in future. The aim here to x-ray and analyse specificities and challenges for the future management of civil protection through newly marked out hazard provinces that must become unavoidable objects for policy action. This is a scientific petition to the power brokers that be, so that forthcoming regional and inter regional anti-hazard institutions should be versed with the hazard history and dynamics of each hazard province, and trim down bureaucracy and bottlenecks in decision taking when the need arises.