“Our Forest or Their Forest?” I heard this question again and again while speaking with communities near the Gola Rainforest National Park in Sierra Leone for my Masters fieldwork in 2025. My research aimed at examining the influence of colonial legacies on contemporary forest management and exploring foundational approaches for decolonial transformations.

This study highlights the following insights:

1. Power imbalance: decision-making power is centralised and sustained primarily by the co-optation of local elites, with limited meaningful participation from local people and communities.
2. Epistemic bias: local ecological knowledge is often excluded from conservation planning and decision-making, privileging scientific and technical expertise.
3. Disruption of human-nature relations: the everyday lives of local people and communities are disrupted through restrictions on farming, cultural practices, and ancestral relationships with the forest.

The dynamics of these interconnections between power, knowledge, and being are grounded in colonial administrative, epistemic, and spatial legacies and have coalesced in the coloniality of nature, separating people from the forest.For many people living in my study area, the difference between “Our Forest” and “Their Forest” is clear.

“Our Forest” is where communities farm, carry out cultural practices, and where knowledge is passed down from one generation to another. It is governed by “informal” rules based on meaningful, lived experience, which fosters human-nature relations.

“Their Forest” relates to a protected area which has formal boundaries, rules, and restrictions.  It is managed by the state and its partners. Decisions are primarily informed by ‘best’ scientific practices and are mostly made in Kenema City, Freetown, or the United Kingdom, with little or no direct involvement of those who bear the consequences of such decisions.

This division did not happen overnight. It is rooted in the colonial form of forestry which Sierra Leone adopted in the early twentieth century. Slightly over a decade after the proclamation of the protectorate in 1896, the British colonial government employed Arthur Harold Unwin (a botanist and forester) and Charles Lane-Poole (a forester), in 1908 and 1909, respectively, as ‘experts’ to assess the economic potential of Sierra Leone’s forests. Concluding that the forests held significant economic potential, their findings directly contributed to: 1) the establishment of the Sierra Leone Forestry Department in 1911 and the promulgation of the Forestry Ordinance Act of 1912, both of which facilitated the creation of forest reserves.

The Gola Forest Reserve was established between 1926 and 1956, leading to the creation of boundaries and conversion of community lands into state-controlled forests. Thus, the forest was divided into two: the community forest (Ours) and the state forest (Theirs).

The creation of these boundaries has implications for the everyday lives of forest-edge communities.

A farmer stated that: “The boundary is so close to our territory … This means that we have only a small portion because we depend on the forest for survival.” He echoed this sense of contraction: “We used to farm how we wanted because our forest was large. Now, the boundary demarcation has made our forest small.”

Another community member explained: “There was a place in the forest where we used to learn artisanal crafts, but we no longer do so because it is now in the Gola forest.”

An 80-year-old man described cultural loss: “Traditionally, we used to have a place in the forest that we visit yearly with our food to observe Sullayo.[i] But, now, the place belongs to Gola.”

An elderly woman added a deeper dimension: “There’s a village called Jargoh, which used to provide huge benefits to us. But we were removed from the village. Even when they promised to compensate us, we have never been compensated … We were very close to the forest. We used to take good care of it. But now, since we are not in the village anymore, we have been removed, we don’t have that ‘time’ again with the forest. (Time in this instance reflects a connection or relationship with the forest.)”

This is why the question (Our Forest or Their Forest?) matters.

When the forest is framed as a space threatened by human presence and is treated as separate from humans, it creates a divide between humans and nature. This division reshapes how people relate to the forest. Over time, this weakens the cultural, social, and spiritual ties that once connected people to the forest.

If forest management continues along this path, it risks reinforcing the very inequalities it seeks to address. Reconnecting people and forests must become central to conservation. This requires understanding the historical foundations that have shaped forest management and moving beyond the divide between “Our Forest” and “Their Forest.”

Instead, the forest must be recognised as a lived space, shaped by, and existing with, the people who live within and around it. This, perhaps, could be facilitated by three foundational approaches to decolonial transformation:

• Historical reparations: Historical injustices related to conservation, such as displacement and restrictions on forest access, should formally be acknowledged and material and non-material compensation for such harms provided by the government and its allies.
• Redistribution of power: Decision-making power should be transferred to forest-edge communities, and their rights to self-determination should be recognised.
• Plurality of knowledges: The co-existence of diverse knowledges as equal legitimate bases for decision-making and forest management should be recognised and embraced.

 

 

 

[i] Sullayo is a practice observed to allow communities to give thanks to their ancestors before and after the annual harvest.