Alors que les pays sahéliens ont adopté depuis plus 10 ans des approches participatives associant les populations rurales à la gestion des ressources forestières collectives, ces populations ne se sont que rarement appropriées de cette gestion et exploitent la savane de façon non durable. Pour expliquer cette timide implication de ces populations, une hypothèse est qu'elles sont fragilisées dans leurs pratiques de gestion par les lobbies des grossistes-transporteurs qui leur dictent leurs choixWhile Soudano-sahelian countries have adopted participative approaches that associate local people to forest collective resource, these people barely follow the management plan and exploit woodlands in an unsustainable way. In order to explain this weak involvement of people, we assume that they are challenged in their management practices by the whole traders and transporters lobbies that impose their choices and by coercive forest services that impose forest norms that they do not follow themselves in the classified forests. This report debates of this hypothesis. Around 40 interviews have been conducted in Burkina Faso and in Mali with stakeholders that worked along the fuelwood chain. These interviews validate the assumption according to which rural people are very barely master of their territories' resource management, despite the devolution processes at run that should place them at the center of that management. Local people have often seized market opportunities brought by these devolution processes, particularly in Mali where the "fuelwood rural market" tool has been generalized. But they did not really take management responsibilities. These rural people haves a wait-and-see behavior and sometimes a touch of nostalgia from the time when they were supervised. Can they be considered as accountable of this situation? Between central States that do not find the resolve to lose the high ground on forest management and whole traders that remain master of the trade even they win less money than before the decentralization processes, local people are not perceived and do not perceived themselves as their natural capital manager
