Seeing Green in Mali’s Woods: Colonial Legacy, Forest Use, and Local Control

Abstract

Political decentralization and local, participatory control of natural resources number among the development trends of the 1990s and the early 2000s. Where they have initially assumed an undifferentiated local community and a free flow of commonly understood information about environments and resources, they are potentially flawed. The devolution of natural-resource management authority to local communities raises questions about who participates in decision making and how state and local institutions work together. This article provides a historical perspective based on archival records that show how state forestry management in colonial Mali reflected the interests of the French administration, in contrast to those of the peasantry. The precolonial peasantry was internally differentiated, and change in the colonial political economy favored certain social groups. In the 1990s, Mali began to reform forestry policy so that forest resource user-groups could have a greater role in management. Data on income and expenditures from a periurban fuelwood-producing village show differential access to and dependence on forest resources for livelihood. Current natural-resource management reforms will do well to consider the role in local society of chiefs and representation of excluded groups.

Keywords::

• decentralization
• Mali
• natural-resource management
• political ecology
• savanna forest