![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
There is often a disjuncture between idealised forestry governance models which posit a ‘win-win for community and environment’ through participatory, multi-stakeholder international development discourses and interventions – and the actually existing processes and structures of natural resource government through which they are articulated. By applying, first, established theorisations of the initial territorialisation of state forestry territory, then conceptualisations of re- and de-territorialisation, derived from Deleuzo-Guattarian formulations, this paper expands on post-structuralist lines of inquiry on the political ecology of forestry to explore substantive transformations in forestry governance in Uganda. It specifically details the role that market environmentalism – the extension of market mechanisms, including carbon forestry, to natural resource governance – plays in reorienting assemblages of actors engaged in forestry governance and in changing configurations of state forestry territory.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the organisers of the ‘Green Economy in the South’ conference, for which this paper was originally submitted, and the University of Kwazulu-Natal’s Department of Geography Cartographer, Brice Gijsbertsen.
Notes
1. Bridge, “Resource Geographies I”; Castree, “Neoliberalising Nature”; and Bakker, “Neoliberalizing Nature?”
2. Larner, “C-Change?”
3. Leach and Mearns, “Environmental Change and Policy.”
4. Murray Li, The Will to Improve.
5. Mwangi and Wardell, “Multi-level Governance of Forest Resources.”
6. Jonas and Bridge, “Governing Nature,” 3.
7. Murray Li, “Practices of Assemblage and Community Forest Management”; and Descheneau and Patersen, “Between Desire and Routine.”
8. Smith, Uneven Development; and Vandergeest and Peluso, “Territorialisation and State Power in Thailand.”
9. Benterrak et al., Reading the Country.
10. See Vaccaro et al., “Political Ecology and Conservation Policies.”
11. See Allen and Cochrane, “Assemblages of State Power.”
12. Leach and Scoones, Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes; and Nel, Assembling Value in Carbon Forestry.
13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
14. Delaney, Territory, 205.
15. Delaney, “Territory and Territoriality,” 207.
16. Nel, Assembling Value in Carbon Forestry.
17. Anderson and McFarlane, “Assemblage and Geography,” 149.
18. Lang and Byakola, A Funny Place to Store Carbon; and Twongyirwe et al., “REDD+ at Crossroads?”
19. Turyahabwe and Banana, “An Overview.”
20. Leach and Scoones, Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes.
21. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, contends that what we call Uganda is not that ‘thing’ that emerged as the result of an inevitable, linear process of colonisation, but a bundle of disparate, varying and uneven tensions that have been temporarily and unsatisfactorily resolved through violence.
22. Swyngedouw, “Governance Innovation and the Citizen.”
23. Sassen, “Neither Global nor National.”
24. Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” 50.
25. Oels, “Rendering Climate Change Governable.”
26. Delaney, Territory, 205.
27. NFA, History of Forest Inventory.
28. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 7–10.
29. Cavanagh and Himmelfarb, “‘Much in Blood and Money’.”
30. Mamdani, The Contemporary Ugandan Discourse on Customary Tenure.
31. Kjekshus, Ecological Control and Economic Development.
32. Doyle, “An Environmental History of the Kingdom of Bunyoro.”
33. Vandergeest and Peluso, “Territorialisation and State Power in Thailand.”
34. Scott, Seeing like a State.
35. For another example of such ‘political forestry’, or ‘national forests’, see Peluso and Vandergeest, “Genealogies of the Political Forest.”
36. Ibid.
37. Peluso and Lund, New Frontiers of Land Control, 647.
38. Turyahabwe and Banana, “An Overview.”
39. Ibid., 2.
40. Neumann, “Nature–State–Territory.”
41. Cowie, “Preserve or Destroy?”; and Struhsaker, “Forest and Primate Conservation.”
42. Langdale Brown, Biomass Vegetation of Uganda.
43. Webster and Osmaston, A History of the Uganda Forest Department.
44. Ibid., vii.
45. Nel and Hill, “Constructing Walls of Carbon”; and Cavanagh and Himmelfarb, “‘Much in Blood and Money’.”
46. Adams, Against Extinction.
47. Nsita, “Decentralisation and Forest Management.”
48. See Webster and Osmaston, A History of the Uganda Forest Department.
49. Nsita, “Decentralisation and Forest Management,” 1.
50. Guweddeko, Anatomy of Museveni and Mengo Crisis.
51. Van de Wiel, “Uganda.”
52. Marquardt, “Settlement and Resettlement”, describes how ongoing encroachment on to de jure protected forest areas has continued over decades: first to maintain or reclaim land which was lost in the creation of reserves; second to relocate into vacant, seemingly unclaimed land; and third to expand land from areas outside the reserves, encouraged by the breakdown of central government authority, the inability to control population movement and official incentives to alleviate land pressures in surrounding district areas.
53. Swyngedouw, “Governance Innovation and the Citizen.”
54. Jessop, “Hollowing out the Nation-state.”
55. Cohen and Bakker, “The Eco-scalar Fix,” 2.
56. Jonas and Bridge, “Governing Nature,” 3.
57. Duffield, “Governing the Borderlands.”
58. Comment made at the REDD Steering Committee Meeting, Kampala, August 2012.
59. Allen and Cochrane, “Assemblages of State Power,” 1074.
60. Jacovelli, “Uganda’s Sawlog Production Grant Scheme.”
61. Nsita, “Facing the Challenges of Change”; and Jagger, Forest Incomes.
62. Khisa, “The Making of the ‘Informal State’.”
63. Interview, former Forestry Actor, November 2012.
64. Ibid.
65. Obua et al., “Status of Forests in Uganda,” 853.
66. District structures were undergoing a similar restructuring at the time, involving the decentralisation of other state functions to local government level. This provided an opportunity to ‘tack on’ a structure and a small staffing complement of two District Forest Officers per district to constitute the DFS.
67. FSSD Official, Kampala, October 2012.
68. Corson, “Territorialization, Enclosure and Neoliberalism.”
69. Büscher et al., “Towards a Synthesized Critique.”
70. Community Focus group responses, Hoima and Masindi, September 2012.
71. For a parallel in Indonesia, see Murray Li, The Will to Improve, 285.
72. Unique, UNIQUE report for SPGS.
73. Interview with Paul Nusali, Kampala, August 2012.
74. Interview with Paul Jacovelli, Kampala, November 2012.
75. Jagger, Forest Incomes.
76. Sikor et al., “Global Land Governance.”
77. USAID. Intergrated Stretegic Plan for USAID’s Program in Uganda.
78. Dean, Governmentality.
79. Pomeroy et al., Uganda Ecosystem.
80. For instance, a study by Makerere University from 2008 to 2011 of 35 CFRs in Eastern Uganda found that most had not been zoned, ostensibly in order to protect valuable and ‘rare’ biodiversity as mandated in the Nature Conservation Master Plan of 2002 (New Vision 2012). Few comprehensive ‘forest’ inventories were done by the debilitated NFA after 1999, because of their relative cost and time consumping nature.
81. Fletcher, “Neoliberal Environmentality.”
82. See Nel and Hill, “Comparing Project Orientations and Commercialisation Logics.”
83. Grainger and Geary, The New Forests Company; Cavanagh and Benjaminson, “Virtual Nature, Violent Accumulation”; Nel and Hill, “Constructing Walls of Carbon”; and Lyons and Westoby, “Carbon Colonialism.”
84. For example, by groups such as the No-REDD+ in Africa Network. See also Lohman, Neoliberalism and the Calculable World; and Bond et al., The CDM cannot Deliver.
85. The four tenure types in Uganda include Mailo (a traditional form of ownership specific to the Buganda state), Freehold, Leasehold and Communal tenure.
86. Interview, Makerere University, August 2012.
87. Interview, NFA Director of Natural Forests, Kampala, October 2013.
88. Martinello, “The Accumulation of Dispossession.”
89. Lyons and Westoby, “Carbon Colonialism”; and Cavanagh and Benjaminson, “Virtual Nature, Violent Accumulation.”
90. Mugyenyi et al., Balancing Nature Conservation and Livelihoods, 5.
91. Nel, “The Choreography of Sacrifice.”
92. See Khisa, “The Making of the ‘Informal State’,” who discusses ‘informalisation’ as a distinct mode of organising and broadcasting power that simultaneously centralises and fragments the state system. See also Mwenda and Tumushabe, A Political Economy Analysis; and Mwenda and Tangri, “Patronage Politics.”
93. Cavanagh and Benjaminsen, “Guerrilla Agriculture?”; and Cavanagh et al., “Securitizing REDD+?”
94. Interview, October 2012.
95. Carmody, “It’s easy to rule a Poor Man.”
96. Interviews with ex-UFD and FRMCP secretariat members, Nakulaabye, Kampala, October 2012.
97. Such interference includes the directive of the president in 2010 in Mount Elgon siding with the community against the Uganda Wildlife Authority, and promises by politicians to encroachers that they would de-gazette areas if they were voted for.
98. Interview, former NFA official, Kampala, July 2012.
99. Anti-Corruption Coalition Uganda, Namanve Forest Report.
100. Interview, NFA range manager, Kiboga, October 2012.
101. Mugyenyi et al., Balancing Nature Conservation and Livelihoods.