Sustainability performance of community forest enterprises (CFES) in Cameroon: Pathways to viable business models

Community forestry has evolved from devolved forest management to the valorisation of forest resources for community development. Community forest enterprises (CFEs) now apply business approaches to enhance economic, social, and environmental outcomes. However, limited research has evaluated CFE performance in tropical countries across these dimensions. This paper proposes a contextualized multi-dimensional framework to evaluate CFEs' performance and applies it to nine CFEs in Cameroon. Data were collected from income and expenditure statements, forest land-use transects, satellite image analysis, and focus group discussions. The study evaluates the performance of Community Forest Enterprises (CFEs) in Cameroon using a multi-dimensional framework. The majority (66.67 %) are intermediate performers, with scores between 2.5 and 3. However, they score poorly on the economic dimension, making them intermediate but skewed performers with better scores on social and environmental dimensions. Only 11.11 % CFE is classified as an effective performer, with scores of three or above on all dimensions. The study found that CFEs face significant challenges in effectively allocating resources to trade in forest products and generating profits, resulting in poor economic performance. However, they perform better in investing in social projects, employing community members, and reducing illegal logging and agricultural expansion. Financial and technical support, policy coordination, and institutional collaboration are needed to improve performance. • Community forest enterprises (CFEs) have multiple objectives. • A quantitative multi-dimensional framework is proposed in this paper. • Communities perform better on their social and environmental dimensions • Several factors affect community forest enterprises' performance. • CFEs require financial, technical, policy and institutional support.