Ironies of Consociation: Forest and Natural Resource Governance in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

The nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), on southeastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, is a unique product of international peace building based on a consociational model of ethnic power sharing. Organized around protection of “vital interests” of its constituent ethnic communities, the BiH state is radically decentralized. In forest administration, national government is practically nonexistent; multiple substate entities including cantons and municipalities operate as autonomous, self-governing units. This paper finds that the politics of accommodation, ironically couched in the language of rights, creates conditions of illiberal dissociation which block consensual natural resource governance. Conservation policies which require political compromise, thus, face a challenge in BiH’s illiberal consociation. Through policy analysis and interviews with representatives of key organizations affected by the 2008 Law on Una National Park, this study finds that when policies are implemented at levels of expected cooperation, the resultant needs are to reconcile rifts of interpretation and coordinate competencies vertically among dissociative bureaucracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Bureaucratic fragmentation
• conservation policy
• consociationalism
• decentralization
• ethnic pluralism
• forest governance
• Una National Park

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Azra Hromadžić for her assistance establishing contacts and translating interviews and documents; I am likewise grateful for the hospitality of my contacts, many now friends, at Una National Park, the Ministry of Agriculture, Water Management and Forestry, and Unsko-sanske šume; finally, the Editors of Society and Natural Resources, David A. Sonnenfeld and Peter Leigh Taylor, deserve special mention for their contributions refining the manuscript.

Notes

Arend Lijphart (1969) is widely recognized as the foundational author of consociationalism. Lijphart’s theoretical model (distinct from BiH’s actual consociational government) is discussed below.

The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a formally decentralized Entity in BiH (see below).

Brokered by the United States government, the agreement’s official name is the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Constitution is Annex IV of the General Framework.

The Dayton agreement did not create the Federation. The pre-existing Federation was the result of the Washington Agreement of 1994. Bosnia and Herzegovina (created a year and a half later) is fashioned according to the same model of ethnic balance as the Federation (Bieber 2006, 67).

State responsibilities are mainly limited to foreign and monetary policy; immigration; criminal law enforcement; communications; transportation; and air traffic control. There is no mention of natural resources.

The Constitution enumerates human rights and fundamental freedoms (Article II) and commits BiH to a comprehensive list of international agreements on individual and group rights (Annex I) (Annex 4: Constitution 1995).

“Constitutional liberalism” is understood to connote the rule of law that protects the basic rights of individuals (Zakaria 1997). Therefore, at issue is whether the political accommodation of groups is compatible with the constitutional protection of individual rights (Taylor 1994).

This view can be traced back to the 19th century and John Stuart Mill’s assertion that democracy is “next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities” (quoted in Lijphart 2002, 38).

Lijphart’s exact words are “ … good social fences may make good political neighbors … ” (Lijphart 1969, 219).

The author’s correspondence with the Federal Ministry for Physical Planning took place via email, and questions were submitted in writing.

The majority of the interviews were conducted in Bosnian using a professional translator or the author’s country expert/translator, who was present during all interviews. At the Federal level, informants typically utilized their own translator. In all other cases, the translator was Azra Hromadžić, cultural anthropologist at Syracuse University and Bosnian native.

GIS data files were retrieved directly from US Šume. Unlike most of the policy documents, these files are not publicly available. Snowballing was used to locate and access individuals willing to share the data.

Since 2003, BiH has been a potential candidate for EU accession, and the agreement to implement the “Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance” (IPA) was signed in 2006 (FAO 2015).

In Figure 2 above, the impacted portions of these regions are in the Osječenica area.