Forest exploitation in Cameroon (1884-1994): An oxymoron of top-down and bottom-up forest management policy approaches.

Forest exploitation in Cameroon goes back to the pre‐colonial period when early ethnic settlers used the ‘law of status’ system to manage land and forests in the territory. With the arrival of colonial powers, beginning with the Germans in 1884, the law of status system was replaced by top‐down state‐centred management system. This top‐down management system was inherited by post‐colonial authorities and enforced until 1994 when a new forestry law was launched, based on bottom‐up management system. This paper reviews all these three systems. Communities are not benefiting from an actual bottom‐up management system. The author argues that the forests sector in Cameroon needs a new management paradigm

Impact of globalisation on domestic family law: multi-tiered marriage in Nigeria as a case study

The concept of globalisation is commonly discussed as an issue in international law. However, little attention is paid to its influence in domestic family law. As a result of the growing trend of globalisation, legal and cultural norms of the host culture and the foreign culture are fused, thereby, leading to cultural homogenisation or cultural hybridisation, depending on the level of accommodation of the foreign norm by the host norm. One of the areas where hybridisation or homogenisation of cultural and legal norms manifests, especially in African countries including Nigeria, is in the marriage system, particularly in the conclusion of marriage contracts. In Nigeria, one of the impacts of cultural hybridisation is the evolvement of multi-tiered marriage, where a couple combines marriages under the statute law, customary law and religious law, especially Islamic law. This paper is an exploratory study of how globalisation impacts on how and why multi-tiered marriage is contracted in contemporary Nigeria. The paper also briefly discusses how the combination of marriages as a response to globalisation affects the operation of family law rules in Nigeria as well as the rights of the parties involved, especially the women