Responzibilization in Natural Resources Governance
Abstract
This compilation of articles and policy briefs constitutes part of the Responsive Natural Resources Governance Research Group’s international collaboration at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies of the University of Eastern Finland. The articles have been published in Responsibilization in Natural Resources Governance, a special issue of the Forest Policy and Economics journal. In this special issue, we describe how the participation in natural resources governance of local governments, citizens and various actors has increased and become more diverse. For example, decentralised models of natural resources governance have created new opportunities for participation, improved decision-making and increased transparency. Our authors, however, take a critical approach to examining the phenomenon of responsibilization in natural resource governance and its linkage with neoliberal economic policy, which aims at privatising state assets, reducing financial regulation, and replacing political activities with market control. Indeed, in the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and in the extensive research literature stemming from his thinking, power structures and the responsibilization of citizens by their governments are given plenty of attention. Besides Foucault, we also refer to scholars of other disciplines who look at responsibilization in different fields, on different levels and from a variety of perspectives (such as Christopher Grey, Ylva Uggla, Meghann Ormond, Iain Ferguson, Tanya Marray Li, and Nancy Lee Peluso). In this compilation, we want to highlight not only natural resource governance, but also other fields that boast critical thinking and extensive research knowledge on responsibilization. The articles in this compilation rely on Foucault’s theoretical framework of power and governmentality, but we also approach responsibilization through the concept of symbolic violence. The term symbolic violence was coined by Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist and a philosopher who has identified symbolic violence in nearly all power structures of society. Responsibilization has become a way to improve economic efficiency and the preconditions of continuous growth. Obligations, instruments of control and demands imposed from above, as well as culturally accepted yet oppressive practices, are examples of soft and invisible violence, which can lead to discrimination, social inequality, corruption, passive governments, and biodiversity depletion. Case studies show how responsibilization impacts to various actors when local governments’, citizens’ and various actors’ responsibility for natural resources governance is increased without at the same time providing them with adequate operating conditions, information and resources. The book is open access from here: https://erepo.uef.fi/handle/123456789/26111
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Despite the growing interest in social forestry (SF), how much do we understand the social, economic and environmental outcomes and the conditions that enable SF to perform? In this article, we use a content analysis of literature on existing traditional SF practiced throughout Indonesia. It examines the outcomes of these systems and the conditions that enabled or hindered these outcomes to understand possible causal relations and changing dynamics between these conditions and SF performance. We discuss the gaps in how SF is assessed and understood in the literature to understand the important aspects of traditional SF that are not captured or that are lost when the diverse traditional systems are converted into other land uses. It aims to understand the potential trade-offs in the State's push for formalizing SF if these aspects continue to be ignored.
The diversity of governance instruments for natural resources provides a rich analytical field for scholars of public action and policy. Existing research contributions on natural resources governance suggest that governance interventions, coupled with the diversity of contexts in which they occur, are associated with many different social and ecological outcomes and careful analysis is critical to attribute outcomes to interventions. This special issue highlights a specific thematic and analytical focus – responsibilization – that we suggest as being common across the diversity of post-state governance arrangements. Responsibilization has attracted attention in other fields of governance – particularly education and health. Broadly, the process of responsibilization is associated with a transfer of responsibilities to administrative arrangements and agents subordinate within a decision-making hierarchy; in turn, decision units receiving new responsibilities adopt the goals of governance and carry associated responsibilities as their own.
The nine articles included in this special issue show how responsibilization unfolds in different forms of decentered natural resource governance. We find that in diverse contexts, the process of responsibilization denotes the assignment of new responsibilities and the emergence and creation of responsible subjects but often without the powers and resources necessary to carry out these responsibilities. Responsible subjects, by becoming responsible for their own actions, behaviors, and well-being, also contribute to greater societal well-being, or what has summarily been called ‘well-doing’. Based on the empirical materials in the included studies, we build upon an analytical approach to governance that takes institutions, incentives, and information as its building blocks. Our analysis draws attention to and leads to a call for governance capacities and resources, as well as capabilities, for local decision makers and agents in proportion to their responsibilities. Inclusive governance of natural resources thus requires that legal governance mandates be matched to resources and powers for lower level decision-making agents to complement and support their mandates and capabilities.
Community-based approaches to forest management and governance promised that transferred responsibilities to forest communities would create the conditions to achieve better conservation and a sustainable use of forest ecosystems, as well as social well-being and poverty reduction for the communities. This article examines the limitations of these approaches in contexts of ambiguous collective property rights and protracted inter-community socio-territorial conflicts, pointing to the responsibilization mechanisms that emerge and their consequences. Using institutional records, media coverage documents, and observations from ethnographic research in the Southern Sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, we look at the contemporary forms of responsibilization of local communities for their ‘well-being’, and explore the effects of such responsibilization in contexts where enforcement of collective property rights is weak, and people's access to natural resources and territories is limited by different government practice intended to “solve conflicts.” Drawing from post-structural political ecology and peace and conflict studies, we argue that governmental intervention in socio-territorial conflicts, mechanisms of responsibilization, and state re-territorialization are paradoxically intertwined in ways that hinder the collaborative features and natural-resource-management capabilities that community-based approaches ostensibly support. Four main practices sustain these mechanisms, (1) channeling disputants to sluggish and legalistic trials; (2) offering monetary compensation as the sole incentive to induce land-tenure settlement; (3) creating and perpetuating “gray” areas where community use of natural resources is restricted; and (4) dealing with weak enforcement of conflict-settlement agreements and collective property rights.
Community Forest Resource Rights (CFR rights) under The Scheduled Tribes and
Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 give
forest-dwelling communities a unique opportunity to extract, manage, and sell Nontimber Forest Products (NTFPs) from their forests. This recognition of CFR rights has enabled forest dwelling communities to develop diverse mechanisms for transparent, equitable, and sustainable processes of NTFP procurement and marketing. The Korchi Mahagramsabha, a coalition of local-level institutions, is an example of one such mechanism that emerged in the post-CFR recognition phase in ‘Gadchiroli’, Maharashtra. The study details the mechanisms for collective action and also the factors that facilitate and impede the functioning of such mechanisms. Given the immediate positive socioeconomic impact, such coalitions/collective action mechanisms and their activities need to be supported in order to make them fully functional and empowered.
Forestry cannot be thought of in isolation from its relations with other sectors and other parts of people’s lives – for both the health of the forests and the well-being of forest peoples.
• Forest governance and everyday management are upheld by a superstructure of gendered forest relations – invisible to mainstream forestry – that often disadvantages women as a social group.
• Well-intentioned gender programmes can backfire, causing adverse effects on forests and forest peoples, if the efforts are not cognisant of context and power relations.
• Constant awareness of differences among various social groups – men, women, different classes, ethnicities – and how their interests intersect differently in various forest contexts is needed for everyone’s energy, creativity and motivation to contribute to sustainable forest management.
• Research suggests that greater democratic governance of forests leads to better environmental outcomes.
• The gender-neutral framing of some SDG goals undermines efforts towards achieving the outcomes called for in SDG 5.
As the Indonesian government sets a target to allocate 12.7 million ha of state forest land for social forestry in 2019, one of the most crucial [and overlooked] issues is the extent of capacity, knowledge, skills, and engagement of social forestry facilitators and the extension workers that support the government in meeting their targets on social forestry. In this short paper, I seek to reorient the discussion towards the main issues and challenges of social forestry capacity development in Indonesia. On the one hand, there are some promising achievements made by the government in the wake of social forestry policy design and implementation, particularly in their ability to expand the scope of targeted areas for social forestry designation, as well as the increase in the numbers of community business group established. On the other hand, however, there are some challenges that are evident. Coordination within the ministry remains a major barrier, and extends to coordination problems across and between sub-national governments. Furthermore, engagement with the private sectors and involvement of NGOs remains lacking. And finally, the distribution of social forestry facilitators and extension workers across the numerous social forestry sites in Indonesia, as well as the overall capacity development needs among facilitators continues to be a major hindrance in meeting targets. I conclude by highlighting that more attention needs to be devoted to the role and capacity of facilitators, and furthermore, that the government needs to address these challenges through various institutional reforms and methods on social forestry training, as well as developing more rigorous training modules for community facilitators.
Although Indonesia is experiencing one of the most complex transformations of social forestry policy in the world, there is a need to step back and more closely examine the politics, ecologies, and economies that provide context for its implementation. This introduction offers a synthesis of the collection of special section submissions in Forest and Society. We begin by navigating the current social forestry moment by presenting a heuristic for identifying the discourses underpinning the rapid expansion in support of social forestry schemes. These perspectives are fragmented across four continuously contested discourses: community-first, legal-first, conservation-first, and development-first. We then contextualize the historical developments that brought social forestry into its current form by laying out a genealogy of its antecedents across three distinct generations. These three generations of social forestry are roughly aligned with the overall political changes that have taken place in Indonesia, each of which engaged in their own mechanisms for defining and administering social forestry. The first generation roughly follows the period of New Order rule; a second generation began as the regime unraveled, resulting in a period of reform and restructuring of the political system. At this time, new legal frameworks were introduced, followed by the development of new implementation mechanisms. We argue that social forestry has entered a third distinct period that is characterized by the expanding interests of numerous stakeholders to formalize permitting schemes. This third generation presents new possibilities for redefining land management on Indonesia’s vast national forests. The contributions to this special issue shed new light on the overall implications of these changes. We divide the findings across submissions, covering broad topical engagement on the economies, ecologies, and politics at different governing scales. From these findings we suggest a course for future research, and identify key policy challenges for the future of social forestry and for Indonesia.
This paper maps the policy actors and their networks in the European Union's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan and the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) process in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). It analyzes power relations in the FLEGT VPA process, as well as actors' preferences in relation to a number of policy issues dealt with in the FLEGT VPA. To provide contextual understanding, the paper explores pathways of policy influence along which international actors influence domestic decision-making processes within the FLEGT VPA. We find that in the Lao FLEGT VPA policy process, power is held by the traditionally most powerful policy actors, the central governmental agencies, donor community and international development partners, while the private sector , civil society organizations and actors from subnational levels are substantially less powerful. Strong policy preferences were noted for all aspects of timber legality, except for the legality of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Similarly, strong preferences were observed for considerations of transparency and accountability, while preferences were comparatively weaker for issues concerning i) forest communi-ties' rights to forest and land, ii) livelihood impacts on small-scale operators and family businesses as well as those of forest communities, and iii) the involvement of civil society organizations in the VPA process. The most dominant pathways through which VPA influences domestic policy-making is the direct access to domestic policy-making, followed by the international rules pathway of influence. Based on our analysis, we argue that imbalance in distribution of power and in representation of actors in the VPA policy network may obstruct the intended outcomes and progress on important policy issues, despite the stated policy goals and resources provided by the donor community. This in turn fosters perpetual dominance of the traditionally powerful policy actors, which is likely to lead to further marginalization and disem-powerment of the less powerful actors, such as forest communities and informal operators.
Governments, multilateral organisations, and international conservation NGOs increasingly frame nature conservation in terms that emphasise the importance of technically managing and economically valuing nature, and introducing markets for ecosystem services. New mechanisms, such as REDD+, have been incorporated in national-level policy reforms, and have been piloted and implemented in rural project settings across the Global South. By reflecting on my research on REDD+ implementation in two case study villages in Tanzania, the paper argues that the emergence and nature of market-based conservation are multi-faceted, complex, and more profoundly shaped by structural challenges than is commonly acknowledged. The paper identifies three particularly important challenges: the politics surrounding the establishment of community-based forest management; the mismatch between formal governance institutions and actual practices on the ground; and the fickleness of income from carbon sales and alternative livelihood opportunities. I argue that these challenges are not merely teething troubles, but they question fundamental assumptions of market-based conservation, more generally. I end with reference to better ideas for achieving sustainable development.
There is growing evidence that good community forest (CF) governance is a significant determinant of CF success. We examined the state of CF governance in Cameroon by applying a set of good governance principles to 36 case studies. Key good governance principles applied included accountability, equity, participation, representation, direction, and performance. The results revealed that the state of CF governance was relatively poor, with 78% of case studies not meeting standards for all the principles. Evidence suggests that all case studies did not meet standards for accountability and equity, while more than 70% of the case studies did not meet standards for participation, direction, and performance. Positive governance outcomes included increased CF employment; contribution to social investments like roofing of houses, provision of water, health, and training; improved community participation in sustainable management of forests; improved awareness of environmental protection and sustainable exploitation practices; and enabling fair representation of and empowerment of indigenous minorities such as the Baka, resulting in the creation of a Baka-led CF. The presence of economic activities that generate direct benefits, the extent of technical support, and influential and supportive elites emerged as key drivers of positive outcomes in CF governance. These suggest that deploying incentives targeted at catalyzing enterprise development such as favorable loans, tax and financial support conditions, reinforced focused technical and institutional support including capacity building, and awards for supportive and innovative elites could go a long way to improve CF governance in Cameroon.
This contribution addresses the growing global trend to promote ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) in support of environmental conservation. NCA seeks to harness the economic value of conserved nature to incentivize local resource users to forgo the opportunity costs of extractive activities. We suggest that this represents a form of neoliberal biopower/biopolitics seeking to defend life by demonstrating its ‘profitability’ and hence right to exist. While little finance actually reaches communities through this strategy, substantial funding still flows into the idea of ‘natural capital’ as the basis of improving rural livelihoods. Drawing on two cases in Southeast Asia, we show that NCA initiatives may compel some local people to value ecosystem services in financial terms, yet in most cases this perspective remains partial and fragmented in communities where such initiatives produce a range of unintended outcomes. When the envisioned environmental markets fail to develop and benefits remain largely intangible, NCA fails to meet the growing material aspirations of farmers while also offering little if any bulwark against their using forests more intensively and/or enrolling in lucrative extractive enterprise. We thus conclude that NCA in practice may become the antithesis of conservation by actually encouraging the resource extraction it intends to combat.
In the past two decades, democratic political practice has taken a deliberative turn. That is, contemporary democratic politics has become increasingly focused on facilitating citizen participation in the public exchange of reasons. Although the deliberative turn in democratic practice is in several respects welcome, the technological and communicative advances that have facilitated it also make possible new kinds of deliberative democratic pathology. This essay calls attention to and examines new epistemological troubles for public deliberation enacted under contemporary conditions. Drawing from a lesson offered by Lyn Sanders two decades ago, the paper raises the concern that the deliberative turn in democratic practice has counter-democratic effects.
The ‘governmentality’ approach has been influential in analyzing how neoliberal governance transfers responsibility to individual agents through an ‘appeal of freedom’ mechanism. This productive conceptualization of power has generated a solid body of research on the workings of (neo)liberal governance and contemporary Western capitalism. However, such research has largely ignored a complementary mechanism characteristic of situations where ‘appeal of freedom’ lets actors down, that is, dynamics of ‘threat to personal control’. Studies focusing and elaborating on this aspect, and ‘control constructs’ more generally, have remained mostly within the disciplinary boundaries of (social) psychology. In this paper we aim to bring the social psychological research on control constructs into a dialogue with governmentality theorizing and to show how neoliberal ‘responsibilization’ can work through threats to personal control, insecurity and governance by fear. We propose one way of utilizing, and advancing, these approaches in tandem with empirical research, by focusing on the analysis of control attributions of the subjects of (neoliberal) governance. With a brief empirical illustration from the context of Australian neoliberal agricultural policies we then show how neoliberal ‘responsibilization’ can be viewed as relying on farmers’ striving to maintain personal control under uncertainty, in addition to the workings of the ‘appeal of freedom’ mechanism.
Recent expansion of the forestry and plantation sectors in Indonesia has intensified agrarian and natural resource conflicts, and created increased awareness of the social, economic and environmental impacts of these disputes. Addressing these disputes is a critical issue in advancing Indonesia’s commitment to sustainable forest management. The Forest Management Units (Kesatuan Pengelolaan Hutan, or KPH), have become the pivotal structural element for managing all state forests at the local level, with responsibility for conventional forest management and policy implementation (establishing management boundaries, conducting forest inventory, and developing forest management plans), as well as the legal mandate to communicate and work with indigenous people and local communities. This paper presents the results of a national survey of all currently functioning KPH units, the first of its kind ever conducted with KPH leadership, to obtain a system-wide perspective of the KPHs’ role, mandate, and capacity for serving as effective intermediaries in managing forest conflicts in Indonesia. The survey results show that the KPHs are still in a very initial stage of development, and are struggling with a complex and rapidly evolving policy and institutional framework. The most common conflicts noted by respondents included forest encroachment, tenure disputes, boundary conflicts, and illegal logging and land clearing. KPH leadership views conflict resolution as among their primary duties and functions, and underscored the importance of more proactive and collaborative approaches for addressing conflict, many seeing themselves as capable facilitators and mediators. Overall, these results juxtapose a generally constructive view by KPH leadership over their role and responsibility in addressing forest management conflicts, with an extremely challenging social, institutional, and political setting. The KPHs can certainly play an important role as local intermediaries, and in some cases, as facilitative mediators in resolving local conflicts, but only with a more concerted effort from central and provincial government authorities to provide greater consistency in policies and regulations, improved policy communication, and a sustained commitment to strengthening the capacity of individual KPHs.
Norway’s climate forest engagement in Tanzania, launched in 2008, not only failed to produce models that work. It ignored promising forestry initiatives that existed at the time, instead re-inventing the development wheel, write Jens Friis Lund, Mathew Bukhi Mabele and Susanne Koch.
Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade agreements between the EU and countries that grow tropical timber aim to complement, alter, or generate new regulatory mechanisms that ensure the legality of timber products. These regulatory changes affect pre-existing policies and practices within timber production networks. The Indonesian-EU Voluntary Partnership Agreement was signed in 2013, and legality verification is scheduled to become mandatory for all smallholders by the end of 2017. Using grower surveys conducted in the Jepara regency of Central Java (n = 204), we generate information on who Jepara smallholders are, what timber species they are growing, and how programs that provide free and discounted seedlings contribute to STP. We use these data to understand how STP operates and how Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu (SVLK), the Indonesian method for timber legality verification, will affect STP networks and producers. We find that resource provision and oversight of source documentation increase formalization within STP. Our discussion details four policy-relevant insights for promoting STP amid continued formalization.
This enlightening book brings together the work of gender and forestry specialists from various backgrounds and fields of research and action to analyse global gender conditions as related to forests. Using a variety of methods and approaches, they build on a spectrum of theoretical perspectives to bring depth and breadth to the relevant issues and address timely and under-studied themes. Focusing particularly on tropical forests, the book presents both local case studies and global comparative studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the US and Europe. The studies range from personal histories of elderly American women's attitudes toward conservation, to a combined qualitative / quantitative international comparative study on REDD+, to a longitudinal examination of oil palm and gender roles over time in Kalimantan. Issues are examined across scales, from the household to the nation state and the global arena; and reach back to the past to inform present and future considerations. The collection will be of relevance to academics, researchers, policy makers and advocates with different levels of familiarity with gender issues in the field of forestry. © 2016 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). All rights reserved.
The states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz and Guerrero have a great presence of rural communities with elevated indicators of poverty, illiteracy and an absence
of the most basic services. Diverse political parties, civil organizations, lawyers, priests and regional bosses take advantage of this situation in order to promote social
tensions that become divisions between neighboring towns, due to land possession, the use of water and natural resources.
In this text we present a general landscape of the dificult situation of the agrarian issue in Oaxaca, of the people’s manifestations regarding agrarian conlicts, their demands, tactics, and the ways in which federal and state institutions have attempted to solve them. In the same way, we present the testimony of a case occurred
on May of 2002, where under the pretext of an ancestral dispute between two towns regarding the indeinition of their territorial boundaries, forest exploitation and that of other natural resources, 26 natives were massacred by a paramilitary group, a crime that remains unpunished to this date. Government authorities promote permanent
oblivion, while the 28 widows and 89 orphans continue to wait for the support offered, and for the material and intellectual authors of the crime to be punished according
to the law.
The quantity and type of Mexican territory that is commonly owned, remains an unclear issue for researchers due to the unavailability of necessary data for its study. Furthermore, academic sectors and governments have questioned the ability of rural collective management and organization to ensure the flow of goods and services, conventional and environmental, required by the modern Mexican society. These goods and services include: raw materials for paper industries, construction, furniture and chemistry, groundwater recharge, wildlife refuge, shelter to biodiversity, carbon sequestration and water regulation, among others. Resolving these issues is a key in the design and implementation of sound public policies that can help us to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. This article seeks to present new evidence to support forethoughtful considerations around this subject.
How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial, and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores how civil society 'thickens' by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations that include participatory social and environmental councils, citizen oversight of elections and the secret ballot, decentralized social investment funds, participation reforms in World Bank projects, community-managed food programs, as well as new social oversight and public information access reforms. Meanwhile, efforts to exercise voice unfold at the same time as rural citizens consider their exit options, as millions migrate to the US, where many have since come together in a new migrant civil society. This book concludes that new analytical frameworks are needed to understand 'transitions to accountability'. This involves unpacking the interaction between participation, transparency, and accountability.
In this study, we examine the political implications of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification and its requirements for participatory governance by focusing on three case studies in Russia and drawing upon qualitative research data from 2002 to 2014. We argue that one of the unintended by-products of forest certification is the advancement of a specific type of citizenship – what we refer to as ‘managed citizenship.’ In managed citizenship, local communities are empowered by new rights endowed to them by a global governance generating network (GGN), such as the FSC. Through the GGN, local stakeholders may become involved in long-term initiatives that provide new opportunities to participate in democratic governance. However, citizens’ involvement is cultivated, directed, and circumscribed by actors from outside the communities, such as environmental and certification experts who educate local residents about their stakeholder status. We also find that the persistent weakness of social interests, as opposed to environmental, within the FSC and the effects of economic instability and weak democracy domestically contribute to the challenges of engaging local communities.
Processes of participatory forestry reform in the Global South in recent decades present us with a paradox. While ostensibly aimed at promoting participation by forest adjacent communities, these reforms more often appear to sustain domination by forest administrations or private enterprises and have increasingly been associated with inequitable social outcomes. Part of the explanation for this must be sought in the professionalization promoted by these reforms in the sense of scientific management approaches and structured and detailed systems of information gathering, dissemination and planning. Professionalization has its roots in the historical development of forestry bureaucracies with a basis in principles of scientific forestry that, more recently, has come to resonate with logics of development and neoliberalism. Professionalization emerges in participatory reform as technically and procedurally demanding framings that inhibit implementation, downplay politics and promote inequality. The contributions to this special issue illustrate empirical pathways to unpack and question the framing of participatory forestry as professionalization by pointing to its anti-democratic and social consequences and questioning its relevance and usefulness to actual forest management practice.
The current expansion of social forestry in Indonesia represents an unprecedented transfer of forest management responsibilities to user-groups across the archipelago. The Indonesian state aims to formalize co-management across 12.7 Mha of forest area to enhance community well-being and environmental as well as economic outcomes for the Indonesian public. Contemporary social forestry in Indonesia thus represents a form of natural resource responsibilization. Analyzing Indonesian social forestry as a process of responsibilization provides insight into how social forestry is performed, whether the alignment between community well-being and societal benefits is valid, and existing tensions that occur through the responsibilization of communities for forest management. Using responsibilization theory to examine social forestry policy, this research first identifies the
activities that create social forestry in Indonesia and responsibilize new actors for forest management. The
transfer of specific control rights to user-groups occurs through a constellation of administrative actors, bureaucratic
activities, and virtual platforms. These activities reify user-groups and seek to unite community wellbeing
objectives with environmental and economic benefits to the larger Indonesian public. However, the responsibilization
of user-groups for forest management results in three important tensions. First, well-being and
well-doing objectives are not always aligned and result in important trade-offs concerning community empowerment.
Second, social forestry initiatives are seemingly optional, but they lack free-entry and formal
channels for challenging state decisions. Third, at present there is an asymmetry between resources dedicated to
approving social forestry permits versus capacity building, monitoring, and evaluating management outcomes.
These three tensions provide insights for social forestry in one of the world's most significant tropical forest
countries, and they point to promising future work in advancing scholarship on natural resource management
and responsibilization.
Community forestry literature promotes the idea that self-governance and self-organization lead to successful forest governance. However, this assumption marginalizes the different roles that external agents can play in organizing the communities to form forest institutions, engage in different outreach and capacity building activities and serve as a source of different kinds of resources. Given the increasing visibility of government and non-governmental organizations in community-based natural resource management, we believe it is important to understand the specific roles and impacts that convergence of these actors have on community efforts in resource governance. In this study, we first investigate the roles of government and non-governmental organizations and then conduct a comparative analysis of those roles to demonstrate synergies that emerge between government and NGOs in local forest governance. We find that while the government mainly provided technical and financial support, it is the NGOs that directed the communities to those resources. Our conclusions highlight that although the government and NGOs work within certain constraints, their convergence can make up for each other’s limitations and synergistically facilitate community efforts in forest governance.
Indonesia is undergoing major policy changes, seeking to expand social forestry designations from less than 1% (1.1 million hectares) to over 10% (12.7 million hectares) of the Forest Estate. Expanding designations is at once a landmark reform and a call for caution, raising questions about policy intentions, and practical concerns about legal, technical, and implementation mechanisms. Social forestry literature highlights three key tenets, namely efforts that: confer rights to local communities, support livelihoods, and achieve conservation outcomes. This paper examines social forestry implementation from a cross-section of sites in South Sulawesi by reflecting on sustained action research between 2012–2016. The approach critically juxtaposes social forestry policy intent with implementation at three different sites. Findings indicate social forestry implementation suffers from historically problematic state enclosures and flawed land administration processes, entrenched political economic interests among local actors, and lack of institutional engagement beyond the permitting process. Shortcuts to addressing entrenched conflict will only heighten tensions or further marginalize the most vulnerable, without guarantees to conservation outcomes.
This essay analyses how the ‘foreign agent’ law has been interpreted and implemented by the Russian authorities and examines diverse NGO survival strategies in response to the ‘foreign agent’ label. The foreign agent law has disrupted and transformed resource mobilisation strategies and transnational NGO networks. Based on qualitative research on environmental NGOs, we offer a typology of NGO responses to the foreign agent law, providing examples to show how the organisations attempt to ensure their survival.
The starting point for this paper is the increasing shift towards green governmentality as a particular mode of governance in the Western world, implying a shift from state-centered regulation to marketbased mechanisms. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the role of environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) in this form of governance. The central question concerns how international ENGOs’ approaches to energy supply and climate mitigation can be understood as aligned with or dissenting from green governmentality. To approach this issue, we analyze the major energy reports of three international ENGOs – i.e. Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and WWF – focusing on their issue framings of future energy supply and climate change mitigation. We conclude that these ENGOs’ issue framings are aligned with green governmentality to varying degrees, involving the economization of environmental issues and the responsibilization and moralization of economic actions. These ENGOs also to varying degrees express opposition or resistance to this mode of governance, for example, by opening up the discussion of various aspects of responsibility, including both remedy and culpability. © 2017, Croatian Sociological Association. All rights reserved.
Discourses of citizenship are profoundly powerful tools both for defining membership of a national community and for establishing the expected dispositions of citizens. Governments and nongovernmental organisations utilise formal and informal education to promote specific understandings of citizenship. However, efforts to promote citizenship are often marked by tensions and paradoxes in terms of content, delivery and reception of these ideals, not least in negotiating global and national, liberal and neoliberal agendas. This paper explores the rationale for and discourses of citizenship presented through a World Bank-backed on-line, transnational active citizenship training and critically interrogates the explicit and implicit ideologies and understandings of citizenship promoted in the course and certain limitations to these, including the types of ‘active’ citizen proposed and the normalised version of participation and civil society these reflect, and apparent limitations in relation to both state- and citizen disengagement as well as the continued challenge of promoting security through engagement across difference.
Community economies can be considered as examples of the diverse economies growing outside common capitalist logics of private accumulation and profit, seeking to bypass or reconfigure dominant global trends of societal and economic organization. Yet, these communities seem to fit quite well under a neoliberal program in which responsibilities are shifting downwards, favoring multi-level governance over State intervention and accountability. This binary character makes imperative an open and critical discussion on the development of community initiatives, including on the motivations and visions of citizens practicing alternative ethical consumption. This article explores the neoliberal rationalities embraced by community members within the imaginaries of change they frame and examines how these rationalities contribute to (re)producing neoliberal conditions and forms of governance. Our analysis builds on semi-structured interviews conducted among the members of 11 initiatives in 5 EU countries and on participant observation. We argue here that communities articulate an “alternative imaginary” of change that appears imprinted by core neoliberal rationalities around questions of individual responsibility, the role of the State, and civic participation and equity. It is an imaginary related to the construction of CBEs to by-pass existing socio-political and economic configurations. This imaginary more often than not responds to neoliberal promises of individual freedom and autonomy and seems to undermine CBEs' more radical possibilities at the same time obscuring more diverse voices of transformation.
The initiative known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) officially became part of the international climate agenda in 2007. At that time, REDD+ was an idea regarding payment to countries (and possibly also projects) for reducing emission from forests, with funding primarily from carbon markets. The initiative has since become multi-objective in nature; the policy focus has changed from a payments for environmental services (PES) approach to broader policies, and international funding primarily originates from development aid budgets. This “aidification” of REDD+ has made the program similar to previous efforts using conditional or results-based aid (RBA). However, the experience of RBA in other sectors has scarcely been addressed in the REDD+ debate. The alleged advantages of RBA are poorly backed by empirical research. This paper reviews the primary challenges in designing and implementing a system of RBA, namely, donor spending pressure, performance criteria, reference levels, risk sharing, and funding credibility. It then reviews the four partially performance-based, bilateral REDD+ agreements that Norway has entered with Tanzania, Brazil, Guyana, and Indonesia. These agreements and the aid experience provide valuable lessons for the design and implementation of future REDD+ mechanisms.
Adopting new and much more comprehensive concepts of both power and politics, the author develops a theoretical framework to show who really governs the world economy. He goes on to explore some of the non-state authorities, from mafias to the 'Big Six' accounting firms and international bureaucrats, whose power over who gets what in the world encroaches on that of national governments. The book is a signpost, pointing to some promising new directions for the future development of research and teaching in international political economy.
By using data from a national contingent valuation survey, we estimate the aggregate benefits of meeting the goals of the Clean Water Act. A valuation function is estimated which depicts willingness to pay as a function of water quality, income, and other variables. Several validation checks and tests for specific biases are performed, and the benefit estimates are corrected for missing and invalid responses. The two major policy implications from our work are that the benefits and costs of water pollution control efforts are roughly equal and that many of the new policy actions necessary to ensure that all water bodies reach at least a swimmable quality level will not have positive net benefits. -from Authors
Neoliberal organizing principles of globalization today are overtaking modernist evolutionary paradigms of development. Nation-states now seek first to position themselves in the global economy rather than maximize national welfare (McMichael 1996:26). Trade liberalization policies worldwide promote a model of economic growth in which markets allocate resources via individual actors making rational decisions about privately owned resources. Given the pervasiveness of this powerful neoliberal vision of growth propelled by individual economic rationality, concern expressed for the future social and ecological sustainability of collectively owned and managed natural resources (Ostrom and Schlager 1996) is well justified. This paper discusses indirect impacts of globalization and its underlying neoliberal policies on community forestry in the Mexican state of Durango. Community forestry is a common property management regime, which pursues sustainability by linking the social and economic interests of local people with forest conservation (Fortmann and Bruce 1988; Peluso 1992; Richards 1997). In Mexico in general and in Durango in particular, community forestry has been a significant feature of forest management. Global market and neoliberal policy pressures on the social institutions of community forestry are particularly visible in Mexico, where the 1910 Revolution set into motion over 70 years of land redistribution and significant collectivization of rural resource tenure. Nearly two decades of economic restructuring, including entry into the GATT in 1986 and NAFTA in 1994, as well as profound changes in rural land tenure regimes, have transformed the framework of agrarian production (Beaucage 1997; Cornelius and Myhre 1998; Gómez Cruz and Schwentesius 1997). Campesino (peasant) timber producers today struggle to develop new strategies to survive in an increasingly competitive global market. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to view Mexico's community-based timber producers as passive objects of structural forces. Mexican agrarian change is shaped not only by external structural pressures such as neoliberal policy reform, but by adaptation, resistance, and appropriation by rural producers defending and pursuing their interests (see, e.g., Cockcroft 1998). As social agents, campesino producers are making and remaking the social institutions that underlie their common pool resource management regimes. This paper explores community-based forestry in the northern state of Durango and focuses on new forms of social organization pursued by timber peasants in the face of structural change. In the first instance, peasants are taking advantage of post-1992 changes in Mexican agrarian law to establish smaller organizational units to work with the communal forest resource as alternatives to collectively organized forestry. In the second instance, campesino producers are developing new forestry-sector alliances with industry and state agencies to pursue timber certification in an effort not only to improve their competitiveness in timber markets but also to revitalize local economies. Below, I discuss strengths of both organizational forms and strategies and identify some of their current and potential problems. I suggest that these and similar innovations in the social institutions of community forestry be evaluated with reference to one of community-based forestry's basic principles of sustainable management: that is, whether they promote viable communities of producers who benefit from the forest resources and have a collective stake in sustainable resource management, or whether they bypass such stakeholder communities in favor of individual beneficiaries.