Forest resource management has undergone profound changes in the last decades, including a tendency to apply participatory approach that seeks to involve local communities. However, the success of the participatory approach tends to remain dependent on the historical and societal context in question. To understand how the participation of forest communities has been changing as a result of the enforcement or non-enforcement of forest management practices, we carried out a study in Cameroon's Korup National Park, with villages within and outside the park that continue to utilise the resources in the park. The empirical research included focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews in three communities and key informant interviews with selected community members, government officials, and non-governmental organisations involved in the park's management. Research findings show that although the forest management system has changed in various policy documents, over the past years from a top-down to participatory approach, a centralised state system is still operational in the national park, with participatory approaches used merely as a legitimizing tool. We show how the existing horizontal power relations (such as gender roles within the communities) and vertical power relations (such as government-community dimensions) simultaneously impact the outcomes of participatory approaches on the ground. Finally, our case shows how the existing governance structures continue to reproduce inequalities and exclusions that originated from the colonial times and through path dependency still influence livelihoods and day-to-day survival of people in the communities.

在过去的几十年里，森林资源管理发生了深刻的变化，包括采用寻求当地社区参与的参与式方法的趋势。然而，参与式方法的成功往往仍然取决于所讨论的历史和社会背景。为了了解森林社区的参与如何因森林管理实践的执行或不执行而发生变化，我们在喀麦隆的库鲁普国家公园进行了一项研究，公园内外的村庄继续利用资源在公园里。实证研究包括在三个社区进行焦点小组讨论和半结构化访谈，以及对选定社区成员、政府官员、以及参与公园管理的非政府组织。研究结果表明，虽然森林管理制度在各种政策文件中发生了变化，但在过去的几年里，从自上而下的方式到参与方式，国家公园的中央集权制度仍在运作，参与方式仅被用作合法化工具. 我们展示了现有的横向权力关系（例如社区内的性别角色）和纵向权力关系（例如政府-社区维度）如何同时影响实地参与式方法的结果。最后，