TY - JOUR
T1 - Disempowering Democracy
T2 - Local Representation in Community and Carbon Forestry in Africa
AU - Ece, Melis
AU - Murombedzi, James
AU - Ribot, Jesse
N1 - Funding Information:
The editors of this special issue would like to thank the authors of each article in the volume for their contributions and for their comments on this introduction. We would also like to thank the sharp critical external reviewers, the Conservation and Society editors and the Skagen Rule and Rupture group (Penelope Anthias, Rune Bennike, Tirza van Bruggen, Veronica Gomez, Eric Hahonou, Kasper Hoffmann, Inge Hougaard, Christian Lund, Mattias Borg Rasmussen) for their constructive comments. The Responsive Forest Governance Initiative (RFGI), from which the articles in this issue came, is a research program of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy Program of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. RFGI was generously supported by the Swedish International Development Agency.
Funding Information:
Cooperation Agency grant entitled the Responsive Forest Governance Initiative to the Council for Social Science Research in Africa, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Comments by Sandra Caya, Dan Brockington, and three anonymous reviewers greatly improved the message of the paper.
Funding Information:
was also funded by the Centre for the Development and Environment (CDE) of the Geography department of the same university. The author was given a Postdoctoral Position for journal articles write up by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) through the Responsive Forest Governance Initiative.
Publisher Copyright:
© Ece et al. 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - All major agencies intervening in community-based and carbon forestry - such as international development agencies, conservation institutions, and national governments - state that their interventions must engage local participation in decision making. All say they aim to represent local people in the design and implementation of their interventions. In practice, decision-making processes are rarely 'free', barely 'prior' poorly 'informative' and seldom seek any form of democratic 'consent' or even 'consultation'. Through case studies of representation processes in forestry programs in the Congo Basin region, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda, this special issue shows how forestry interventions weaken local democracy. We show that participatory and 'free, prior and informed consent' processes rarely reflect local needs and aspirations, they are rarely democratic and they do not permit participants to make significant decisions - such as whether or how the project will take place. The intervening agents' choices of local partners are based on expedience, naïve notions of who can speak for local people, anti-government and pro-market ideologies informed by a comfort with expert rule. Although elected local governments are present in all cases in this special issue, they are systematically circumvented. Instead, project committees, non-governmental organizations, customary authorities, and local forestry department offices are recognized as 'representatives' while technical project objectives are favored over democratic representation.
AB - All major agencies intervening in community-based and carbon forestry - such as international development agencies, conservation institutions, and national governments - state that their interventions must engage local participation in decision making. All say they aim to represent local people in the design and implementation of their interventions. In practice, decision-making processes are rarely 'free', barely 'prior' poorly 'informative' and seldom seek any form of democratic 'consent' or even 'consultation'. Through case studies of representation processes in forestry programs in the Congo Basin region, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda, this special issue shows how forestry interventions weaken local democracy. We show that participatory and 'free, prior and informed consent' processes rarely reflect local needs and aspirations, they are rarely democratic and they do not permit participants to make significant decisions - such as whether or how the project will take place. The intervening agents' choices of local partners are based on expedience, naïve notions of who can speak for local people, anti-government and pro-market ideologies informed by a comfort with expert rule. Although elected local governments are present in all cases in this special issue, they are systematically circumvented. Instead, project committees, non-governmental organizations, customary authorities, and local forestry department offices are recognized as 'representatives' while technical project objectives are favored over democratic representation.
KW - Africa
KW - Carbon
KW - Community Forestry
KW - Emancipation
KW - FPIC
KW - Local Democracy
KW - REDD+
KW - Representation
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U2 - 10.4103/cs.cs_16_103
DO - 10.4103/cs.cs_16_103
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85041629801
SN - 0972-4923
VL - 15
SP - 357
EP - 370
JO - Conservation and Society
JF - Conservation and Society
IS - 4
ER -