The south western Cameroon that lie between the Atlantic Ocean and mount Cameroon with plush and different forests (mangrove, community and mountain) and carved out zones of activities like hunting, gathering, ranging, logging and farming is home to diverse flora and fauna providing tangible and intangible benefits as gifts of nature to adjacent communities, emphasizing wildlife dynamics in ecologies (flora and fauna). For better management and regulation, there exist in this regard a plethora of duly ratified international and national laws which regulates forestry and hunting especially so with the decentralization of forest management by the 1994 Forestry and wildlife code creating community forestry and hunting as veritable instruments of sustainable environmental management and conservation. However, the efficacy in the implementation of these laws is worrisome because of some gaps. Mindful of this, adopting qualitative methods, the objective of this article is to analyse some socio-legal gaps in community forest regulation in order to evaluate the extent to which it affects environmental forest management of the south western Cameroon. Finding several that although Cameroon is a leader in Central Africa in environmental forest policies, governance and to a certain extent regulations, some identified Socio-legal gaps in environmental management continue to dilute the substantial efforts made affecting there by the indigenous peoples right to the forest raising questions on environment justice especially where their right to access, use and exploitation of especially forest resources the life wire of their social and economic empowerment amongst others may be compromised.

Keywords: Socio-legal gaps, Environmental forest management, Social economic empowerment, hunting, regulation.