Governance in Landscape Restoration Interventions in Cameroon’s Afromontane Region: The Example of the Bamboutos Mountain

Restoration of degraded forest landscapes is now high on the international political agenda.Cameroon has committed to restoring more than 12 million of its degraded forest lands over a 20-year period.Among these landscapes, the Bamboutos Mountains in the western highlands are a priority area.In order to contribute to this process, baseline studies are needed to support stakeholders in achieving their restoration objectives, including the governance arrangements.To this end, this study aimed to assess the quality of current governance for the restoration of the Bamboutos Mountain in order to inform the various stakeholders and decision-makers on the prospects for good governance for the restoration.It took place from February to June 2022 in six riparian communities on the western slopes of this landscape.The data collection was done through an interview guide with the stakeholders where it was a question of assessing on a 5-point score, the quality of governance through the 03 pillars and the 06 principles of governance proposed in the FAO-PROFOR evaluation framework.The Wilcoxon one-tailed statistical test was used to measure the overall quality of this governance in the R software.The results of this assessment show that Pillar 1 on policy, legal, institutional and regulatory frameworks for restoration of the degraded Bamboutos Landscape has a good score of 3.35/5; Pillar 2 on planning and decision-making processes on the other hand has a poor score of 2.95/5 and Pillar 3 on implementation, enforcement and compliance with regulations also gets a good score of 3.16/5.Overall, it appears that current governance is good for the restoration of the Bamboutos Mountains in terms of the results achieved.However, the planning and decision-making process still needs to be improved.