TY - JOUR
T1 - Shaping Rules and Practice for More Justice. Local Conventions and Local Resistance in Eastern Senegal
AU - Faye, Papa
AU - Haller, Tobias
AU - Ribot, Jesse
N1 - Funding Information:
Negotiations among resource users to create these local conventions and obtain recognition by the diverse local authorities (customary, elected local political authorities and local state appointees) are usually organized and financially supported by state and donor environmental projects. This was the case for the local convention of the Rural Community of Koussanar, which was initiated and funded by Wula Nafaa. In Senegal, local conventions are justified by a discourse of sustainability (Faye ) following an exaggerated narrative of natural resource depletion in the region (Fairhead and Leach ; Ribot ). In Koussanar, participatory deliberative processes yielded formal documents composed of an array of rules – “the set of instructions for creating an action situation in a particular environment” (Ostrom :17). These compulsory rules are expected to be ‘constitutional’ regulations of actions and interactions of both the insiders and outsiders.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
PY - 2018/2/1
Y1 - 2018/2/1
N2 - Participatory programs and the transfer of the means of regulation to local populations can move local people to adopt government or development project agendas. They do not always succeed. When externally driven agendas fail to match local norms and practices, they are resisted and re-worked to accommodate local views, needs, and aspirations. In this interaction both the external agenda and local norms are contested and reconstituted in ways that follow the contours of the power asymmetries among local actors and external resource users, government agents and project managers. In the Tambacounda Region of Senegal, forest-dwelling villagers constantly negotiate forest use with more powerful urban-based merchants and transhumant herders. Government and international development programs have introduced ‘local conventions,’ written agreements among resource users, to reduce conflict over resource-use decisions. However, despite elaboration through participatory processes these conventions impose rules of management and use that contradict local environmental subjectivities; consequently, local people resist and rework introduced rules, and thus reconstitute them as, at least partly, their own.
AB - Participatory programs and the transfer of the means of regulation to local populations can move local people to adopt government or development project agendas. They do not always succeed. When externally driven agendas fail to match local norms and practices, they are resisted and re-worked to accommodate local views, needs, and aspirations. In this interaction both the external agenda and local norms are contested and reconstituted in ways that follow the contours of the power asymmetries among local actors and external resource users, government agents and project managers. In the Tambacounda Region of Senegal, forest-dwelling villagers constantly negotiate forest use with more powerful urban-based merchants and transhumant herders. Government and international development programs have introduced ‘local conventions,’ written agreements among resource users, to reduce conflict over resource-use decisions. However, despite elaboration through participatory processes these conventions impose rules of management and use that contradict local environmental subjectivities; consequently, local people resist and rework introduced rules, and thus reconstitute them as, at least partly, their own.
KW - Decentralization
KW - Forestry
KW - Local regulation
KW - Local resistance
KW - Senegal
KW - Sustainable resource use
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U2 - 10.1007/s10745-017-9918-1
DO - 10.1007/s10745-017-9918-1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85025838441
VL - 46
SP - 15
EP - 25
JO - Human Ecology
JF - Human Ecology
SN - 0300-7839
IS - 1
ER -