Decentralised forest management approaches are ostensibly designed to increase community involvement in forest management, yet have had mixed success in practice. We present a comparative study across multiple countries in Eastern Africa of how far decentralised forest policies are designed to achieve devolution. We adopt the decentralisation framework developed by Agrawal and Ribot to explore whether, and how, devolution is specified in Tanzanian, Kenyan, Ugandan, Malawian and Ethiopian forest policies. We also compare them to the commitments of the Rio Declaration. In all five countries, the policies lack at least some of the critical elements required to achieve meaningful devolution, such as democratically elected, downwardly accountable local actors and equitable benefit sharing. Calling an approach ‘community’ or ‘participatory’, does not mean that it involves all residents: in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, policies allow a small group of people in the community to manage the forest reserve, potentially excluding marginalised groups, and hence limiting devolution. This may lead to elite capture, and effective privatisation of forests, enclosing previously de facto common pool resources. Therefore, even without flaws in implementation, these decentralisation policies are unlikely to achieve true devolution in the study countries.