Special section: Land use options in dry tropical woodland ecosystems in Zimbabwe: Introduction, overview and synthesis

The articles included in this special section focus on the ecological and e conomic interactions of woodland use in Western Zimbabwe. One of the aims w as to investigate the use of modelling to achieve integration among discipl ines. The integrated model draws on the models in the different papers comp rising the special section. The model has five ecological sectors, five sec tors covering woodland use by local people and the state forestry organisat ion, two sectors to cover agriculture, one sector for population growth and land use, a sector to cover carbon sequestration, and a sector to calculat e net present values of the various uses. The state has usually attempted t o keep people and their livestock out of the state forest. We show that the private benefits of cropland may be greater than those related to state or local use of the woodland, but further work is required to incorporate the public costs of subsidies to cropland, and the public benefits of woodland services. Livestock production in the woodlands is compatible with woodlan d management, both from economic and ecological perspectives. Expulsion of forest (1) dwellers from the state forest makes little ecological impact on the woodland, and does not improve the economic value of the woodland to t he state. However, if the Forestry Commission relaxes the current control o n in-migration, it is likely that the woodland will be rapidly depleted in the face of massive in-migration. Modelling is seen as a framework for inte gration of ecological and economic issues, but further work is required to incorporate institutional perspectives from the sociological and anthropolo gical disciplines. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.