Recentralizing While Decentralizing: How National Governments Reappropriate Forest Resources

Published Date
November 2006, Vol.34(11):1864–1886, doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.11.020

Rescaling Governance and the Impacts of Political and Environmental Decentralization

Author 

• Jesse C. Ribot

• World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA

• Arun Agrawal

• University of Michigan, MI, USA

• Anne M. Larson

• Center for International Forestry Research, Managua, Nicaragua

Accepted 10 November 2005. Available online 20 September 2006. 

Summary

Decentralization initiatives have been launched in the majority of developing countries, but these rarely lay the foundations necessary to reach decentralization’s purported efficiency and equity benefits. This paper uses a comparative empirical approach to show how central governments in six countries—Senegal, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Nicaragua—use a variety of strategies to obstruct the democratic decentralization of resource management and, hence, retain central control. Effective decentralization requires the construction of accountable institutions at all levels of government and a secure domain of autonomous decision making at the local level.

Key words

• decentralization
• natural resource management
• forestry
• local government
• accountability
• democratization

For further details log on website :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800909001852