Introduction
‘If we [local producers] put a piece of charcoal in the ass of a hyena, a forest agent will find it out and confiscate it. Forest merchants just bribe them [forest agents1] and go; they can afford it.’ (Interview with ‘Meufitt’,2 27 May 2012)
Prior to 1998, the promoters of participatory forest management projects expected that involving autochthonous forest villagers would make them pay attention to environmental considerations of the forests to a greater extent than private merchants and migrants. The ultimate aim of the projects was that forest villagers would replace urban private merchants and the migrant woodcutters who work for them and, therefore, rural poverty would be alleviated since forest villagers would gain cash from entering charcoal production and trade (the charcoal market).
The involvement of forest villagers in the charcoal market is technically organised through forest management plans (FMPs), which were imposed by the Forest Service in 1998 as a prerequisite for the authority over the forests to be transferred to surrounding elected local governments. Prior to that date, forest agents had full control over the forests (Gellar 1997), except for private forests. After almost 20 years of intervention, forest management projects have failed to achieve their goals. Forest villagers are no better off because they are now limited at the production stage and restricted from selling their charcoal on the lucrative urban market. Through forestry regulations, profits from the commerce of charcoal in the lucrative urban markets is reserved for those politically and economically positioned to benefit, despite the progressive legislation and discourses of the projects. Rather than replacing the merchants, forest agents have reclassified them, since 2010, in the disrespectful category of ‘local producers’. They are making only small profits, due to restricted participation in the commodity chain. Since forest villagers have limited access to urban markets, the so-called ‘local producers’ are selling at the forest edge to merchants who still monopolise the lucrative market, thus capturing larger profits. The relegation of forest villagers to the category of ‘local producers’ is consistent with the weak rights and little access to resources given to them within the larger charcoal political economy.
This relegation takes place through the politics of recognition. By ‘recognition’, I refer to the transfer of rights and resources to social groups (Ribot, Chhatre, and Lankina 2008), that is, clearly the acknowledging of their existence and the coherence of the categories they represent (Taylor 1992). Transferring rights and resources (recognition) or not appropriately transferring rights and resources to a social group (misrecognition) impacts on its well-being, wealth, citizenship and identity. Recognition usually refers to an ensemble of principles for remedying prejudicial inequities (Taylor 1992). As a discursive acknowledgement, it can also result in redistributive outcomes. Drawing from Honneth (2003), whose perspective on recognition includes redistribution, I conceive of recognition as a form of redistributive policy. While for Fraser (2008, 17) redistribution consists of reallocating income democratically or even transforming basic socio-economic structures, I define redistribution as the processes of providing the concerned groups with the power ‘to be well’, and the power ‘to influence’. Therefore, redistribution is itself an act of recognition. The redistributive aspects of recognition shape these two powers, which can be triggered by state institutions through mechanisms of law, discourse and practice.
Conceived as distribution, recognition may affect social groups’ sense of ‘being well’ and their ability ‘to influence’. These two outcomes of recognition interact and are mutually constituted. For a given social group, the ability to influence decisions that shape the political economy, which determines its livelihood and wealth, may affect its own sense of being or its identity and vice versa.
In this regard, the sense of being recognised increases a group’s ability to influence and gives it a good image of self. Being not recognised (non-recognition), instead, deprives a group of those two outcomes. Misrecognition, which is the attributing of qualities to people against their own sense of well-being through prejudices (Taylor 1992, 25) would erode the self-image of groups (Englund 2004). Further, the case of charcoal in Senegal shows that recognition, misrecognition and non-recognition have porous and temporal boundaries: a currently recognised group can be misrecognised in the future, depending on the dynamics of the political economy at stake as shown in this case.
In the same way as Isin and Turner (2002), Patterson (1999) and Ribot (2007), I conceive of ‘citizenship’ as the ability for individuals to influence the political economy in which they are involved. Citizenship is often approached in social sciences as the static basis of the rights and obligations that individuals (may) have or claim (Rawls 1971; Marshall 1950; Somers 2008). Indeed, scholars mostly look at how national policies impact differently on existing identities such as religion, caste and ethnicity (Ndegwa 1998; Benda-Beckman and Benda-Beckman 2010) or at the differential rights and obligations of socio-political statuses such as autochthones and migrants (Hochet 2012).
My point herein is that identity politics shape the formation of citizenship in a given society. The extent to which groups can influence the political economy in which they are embedded is directly delated to the ways in which they imagine themselves. Both identity and citizenship are determined by the politics of recognition, since different actors hold different rights and resources and may have different abilities to influence, which in turn affects images of themselves.
An identity is an image that refers to an ensemble of social and political characteristics attached to a group or a self-perceived image constituted by the subjectivities and histories of the group itself. Therefore, an identity can be assigned, self-constructed or both.
As suggested by the case study presented in this article, I conceive of identities as being culturally bounded categories but also as being politically manufactured. In this sense, the political institutions and actors can produce identities that overlay or reshape culturally existing identities – which themselves are products of the crucible of politics at multiple levels. Culture is therefore the sediment of past politics – identities are produced and become culture through political struggles, adjustments, and impositions.
I will use these concepts of citizenship and identity to analyse the effects of the policies and regulations applied to the charcoal market in Senegal in light of the recognition theory.
This article shows how the politics of recognition of forest villagers by project and policy interventions have categorised the forest villagers engaged in the charcoal market as a new category of identity called ‘local producers’ that is unequally juxtaposed to urban forest merchants in Senegal. This manufacturing of identity has enabled different individuals of the created categories to exercise different degrees of power to shape the charcoal political economy and to have different images of themselves.
The empirical work for this article mainly took place in two project areas. The first is the Sustainable and Participatory Energy Management Program known as PROGEDE (from its French acronym of Programme de gestion durable et participative des energies traditionnelles et de substitution) – a mainly World Bank-funded project that ran from 1998 to 2016. The second is the USAID-funded project of Agriculture and Natural Resources Program, known by its local nickname of Wula Nafaa. The fieldwork operations cover an approximate cumulative 15 months over 2012–2014. These more intensive fieldwork periods were facilitated by previous fieldwork over no less than 10 months in 2004 and 2005, and several weeks in 2008 and 2011. The data mainly stemmed from open and semi-structured interviews as well as informal discussions and life stories. I conducted participant observation, as I was involved in charcoal activities, project events and daily village life; it was cross-cutting, transversal to all the extended fieldwork I did from April 2004 to January 2014.
The research used a ‘studying through’ method (Wright and Reinhold 2011), which stands for a dynamic combination of ‘studying up’ – interviews with high-level staff members; and ‘studying down’ – interviews and observation on the ground (Nader 1972). ‘Studying through’ helps us to discover practices on the ground at specific times and locations. However, to explain the linkages between laws, ground practices and higher-level discourses, I call on new institutionalism in (economic) anthropology (Ensminger 1992; Haller 2010). To analyse the effect of the interplay between discourses, laws and practice on citizenship, I combined ethnographic methods citied above with a systematic content analysis of laws and regulations, and standard documents as well.
The next section examines the recognition that was promoted by the 1996 decentralisation reform. The subsequent section analyses the two forest management projects’ politics of recognition of forest villagers and how the Forest Service has reversed them. The following section assesses the effects of the politics of recognition on citizenship and identity of forest villagers. Finally, I discuss the results and draw their theoretical and practical implications for social justice in natural resources governance.
The charcoal market after decentralisation: laws for institutional recognition
This section shows how democratic decentralisation laws have empowered the local people in relation to access over the ‘community forests’ – non-gazetted forests (i.e., not classified as protected forests or private forests) within the territory of a Rural Community. The local people have been recognised through their elected local government entities known as Rural Councils (deliberative body) and Presidents of Rural Councils or PCRs4 (the executive body). The local governments had to politically represent local people as far as the governance of the community forest is concerned. This is what I am referring to as institutional recognition of the local people.
Before the launch of decentralisation and forest management projects in the late 1990s, commercial forest access for charcoal production and trade (charcoal market) was the exclusive right of some licensed urban private merchants (see RdS 1972)5 that used to hire some migrant woodcutters to do the production work (Ribot 1990, Ngom 1996).
Most forest villagers disliked charcoal production (Ribot 1998; Thiaw and Ribot 2005; Faye 2006) and, even if they liked it, could not work in the charcoal market without either having a licence, which in practice was unattainable for them (Ribot 1998; Faye 2006), or by becoming a merchant’s employee. In any case, the forest villagers had no say on forest policies and practices. The Forest Service used to justify their heavy oversight of forests by citing the land law of 17 June 1964, which declared that all forests came under state control. In 1996, both the Decentralisation Code and the 1998 ‘decentralising’ Forestry Code recognised the elected local government that politically represents local people. The content analysis of the Decentralisation Code shows clearly that local governments were entitled to deliberative rights about forest access and management, such as to:
define environmental and natural resource management priorities and initiate local projects in relation to exploitation and conservation (RdS 1996, Provisions L200, R3, R39 and R48);
decide on any commercial usage in the community forest (RdS 1996, Provisions L195 and R45);
determine conditions for local participation in environmental and natural resource management (Ibid., Provisions 40 and R43).
The PCRs also received the significant executive power to deliver a necessary local prior authorisation known as autorisation préalable, required before any woodcutting activity, including charcoal production, could proceed in community forests (RdS 1996, Provision R46; RdS 1998, Article L14). With that required condition, the PCRs could accept or refuse any woodcutting in the community forests, following villagers’ opinions. However, the PCRs often came under (discursive) political pressure (see Faye 2006; Kanté 2006) and bribery (Ribot and Faye 2007) to induce them to sign the local authorisation. The government view that the charcoal supply is a public service delivery, and the financial flows to forests through illegal payments from merchants favoured the merchants (Ribot and Faye 2007, 2010). Therefore, although some decision-making powers had been formally transferred to local governments by the central government, the exercise of power was retained in practice by forest agents despite the intervention of participatory forest management projects.
This section has outlined the legal environment that underlies the relations between the Forest Service, forest merchants, local governments, and forest villagers – relations through which rights and revenues from the forestry sector are redistributed. The next section depicts the politics of recognition of the forest villagers under the so-called participatory forest management interventions and how the Forest Service ended up reversing it to misrecognition.
The charcoal market during participatory forest management: from recognition to misrecognition
This section describes the politics of recognition of forest villagers by participatory forest management projects using the case of PROGEDE. It shows that the Forest Service has been progressively shifting the exclusive recognition of forest villagers (replacement of merchants by forest villagers) by means of misrecognition.
Participatory forest management for exclusive recognition of forest villagers
In contrast to the 1996 decentralisation reform, participatory forest management projects chose to devolve the authority over forests ‘directly’ to village-based organisations, following the rationale that elected local governments were ‘politicised’. Forest villagers were regrouped into some village committees in the PROGEDE areas. These village-level committees were then regrouped into several larger committees at the forest block level.6 This latter grouping was based on forest management experts’ assessments of the socio-cultural proximities of villages. Village committees and forest block committees were finally regrouped into an inter-village committee that would manage the concerned community forest, replacing the local government. I am referring to this shift as ‘popular recognition’; it rejected the representative local democracy that the 1996 decentralisation reform promoted and was a kind of ‘depoliticisation’ (à la Ferguson 1994).
In this way, project interventions overrode local government authorities from the forest governance in general and from the charcoal political economy in particular. This process occurred at different degrees from project to project. In PROGEDE, local government authorities were completely excluded from inter-village committees that would have power over charcoal production and trade. In Wula Nafa, however, the inter-village committee had a mixture of village delegates and local government members. The head of the local government technical commission for environment and natural resource management became leader of the inter-village committee.
Since forest villagers disliked charcoal activities, which were central for participatory forest management policies, projects – PROGEDE in particular – spent lots of time in sensitising local people about the potential monetary benefits they could derive from charcoal production and trade while dissimulating the charcoal aspects of their activities, instrumentalising the discourse of combating forest fires (a local concern at that time) (Faye 2015a) and giving material incentive to participants at their early stage of intervention (Faye 2006; Boutinot and Diouf 2006).
Furthermore, there were two ways in which local people could enter the charcoal market. Villagers who became affiliated to the committees gained the right to produce charcoal. As individual production was not yet allowed for forest villagers, management projects mastered the training of several members of village committees in the charcoal-making techniques set out in the Forest Management Plans (FMPs). Only trained members gained the right to produce for their village committee. This was called direct charcoal production.
However, village committees had limited rights to send their charcoal to the lucrative market of Dakar. They could only sell their product at the forest edge, with prices of around US$1.50 per sack, compared to about US$20 in Dakar (Faye 2013). It should be noted that prices are fixed by private merchants according to their convenience, making them very low at the forest edge and very high at the city to widen their profit margin (Ribot 1990, 1998). Afterwards, only the inter-village committee presidents gained the right to transport charcoal to the lucrative urban markets, with a mandate to collect and transport charcoal produced by village committees that opted to sell in Dakar. Even in this case, village committees were forced to advance their charcoal on credit to the inter-village committee at the price of US$2 per sack. Giving the mandate only to the president of the inter-village committee to access the lucrative markets was a subtle way of restraining local people’s access to urban markets. In fact, none of the inter-village presidents I interviewed could do more than three trips to Dakar before the charcoal season closed. That achievement would represent 36 truckloads sent to Dakar by forest villagers, comprising 500,000 quintals (a quintal is about 100 kilograms) each year.7 Indeed, the village committees’ charcoal-makers were barred from access to the lucrative markets until 2008 when enough FMPs were completed and approved, restraining charcoal production in project-managed forests. The era before 2008 was called the ‘pre-management’ period.
During the pre-management regime, the village committees that were unwilling to engage in charcoal production on their own could also delegate their right to produce charcoal to some private, urban merchants. In this arrangement, the inter-village committee, on behalf of the concerned village committees and under the supervision of the Regional Forest Service Office, used to sign a contract with the national union of the merchants. The delegation of the right to produce to outsiders described above was called contractualisation (PROGEDE 2008; USAID-Wula Nafaa 2008).
Also, the village committee charcoal-makers’ right to produce charcoal was spatially limited to the forest parcels and blocks nearest to their villages, while forest merchants were producing in any open site throughout the country. While the opportunities of committees to access the charcoal market were restrained, the local governments that politically represented them according to decentralisation also lost their previous power to take the decision to grant prior consent of the local people for charcoal production and trade within their community forest.8 In PROGEDE areas, the inter-village committees formally received the power to decide over community forests, replacing local governments in signing the contracts during the contractualisation annual meetings and representing the local people in any project events, as well as collecting and overseeing the charcoal tax of US$0.4 per sack sold (deduction applies to the forest-edge price) that was introduced by the projects. In practice, inter-village committees in PROGEDE areas were subordinate to the project staff and the Forest Service, since all decisions over charcoal were claimed to be too technical for forest villagers. They were therefore disadvantaged by the project in terms of participation or voicing their opinions (Faye 2015a, 2015b). Inter-village committee presidents accepted their subordinate positions because of the many privileges they were gaining, especially with regard to the allocation of material incentives and access to the lucrative urban market.
In sum, although project interventions and the Forest Department preferred popular recognition to the institutional recognition that the letter of decentralisation laws promoted, both projects and forest agents ended up turning off the voice of the forest villagers, since the inter-village committees they chose in the place of local governments were subordinate to the project staff and forest agents.
From exclusive recognition to misrecognition of forest villagers
Below, I show how the Forest Department is exercising misrecognition of the local people through regulations and practices backed with types of discourse. The decrees (arrêtés) analysed here come annually from the Ministry of the Environment (ME) to inform the concerned actors about the operational rules for commercial forestry exploitation. They are drafted by the Forest Management and Production Directorate, which proposes them for signature to the Forest Department Director and then to the ME for ratification. The Forest Department director and heads of Regional Forest Service Offices can also issue additional circulars.
In its annual decree of 2008, the ministry in charge of natural resources and environment, through the Forest Department, took the official decision to allow charcoal production only in managed forests and to put an official end to the quota distribution at the national level (ME/DEFCCS 2009). Following this administrative decree, charcoal-related decisions were to be made closer to the concerned sites and people, and quotas were to be allocated at the regional level. In 2009, a circular (Note de service) of the Forest Department, said to complement the decree of 2008, limited the forest villagers’ production quota to a maximum of 30% of the total quota for each community forest (DEFCCS 2009, Forest Department order No. 04255 of 30 March 2009).
The 2010 decree made forest villagers’ access to charcoal conditional upon their holding a ‘local producer card’ (ME/DEFCCS 2010, Article 19). This was the first time the term ‘local producer’ appeared as a category of actors in the charcoal market, separate from local people as a community and differentiated to forest merchants. Since then, local producers’ rights to access the charcoal market are being increasingly differentiated from those of the merchants. For instance, in 2011, the Forest Department officially barred local producers from recruiting migrant woodcutters (ME/DEFCCS 2010, Articles 18 and 22), forcing them to produce the charcoal themselves while urban merchants continued hiring migrant labourers. This differentiation followed the logic of the forest agents that merchants still need to ensure regular charcoal supply until local producers are able to cover the national demand for charcoal.
Furthermore, in 2013, the non-recruitment of migrant woodcutters by local producers became a criterion in the measuring of their production performance (ME/DEFCCS 2013, Article 14). Local people who want to engage in the charcoal market now have to register at a project village or block committee that will issue their local producer card. However, the card is only for forest villagers who are able to demonstrate their Senegalese nationality (ME/DEFCCS 2013, Articles 22 and 27). The idea of imposing village residency and Senegalese nationality was taken up by the Forest Department from a PCR that was complaining about some migrant woodcutters who started settling in forest villages in order to be given similar rights to forest villagers in the charcoal activity. Through village residency and nationality, the Forest Department is pushing forward the idea of autochthony, excluding the migrants from access except if the privileged merchants employ them.
Starting with the 2013 decree, the Forest Department took away the village committees’ right to deliver the local producer card, passing this to the most local forest service office and requiring applicants to first obtain the signature of the PCR certifying that they met the local requirement (ME/DEFCCS 2013, Article 22).
While local producers were being misrecognised through the publication of the annual decree, forest merchants gained the right to remain in charcoal production and trade rather than leaving it, as promised at the beginning of the projects. They sustained their access to production quotas and permits through contracts between their union and local producers’ leaders (ME/DEFCCS 2010, Provisions 12 and 13). They also did so because they were the only group authorised by the Forest Department to purchase from the auctioning of the confiscated charcoal (ME/DEFCCS 2010, Provision 23); local producers could not do this, as they did have merchant status following the old regulation from 1972 (RdS 1972) that is still not updated. In addition, if private merchants were able to increase their production, they were given the opportunity to hire more migrant woodcutters in 2013, as the ratio of labourers that could be hired officially increased from one woodcutter per 300 sacks in 2008 to one per 100 sacks (ME/DEFCCS 2013, Provision 25).
This subsection has depicted a process of misrecognition of forest villagers who ended up being classified officially since 2010 in the limiting category of ‘local producers’ rather than replacing the merchants in the role of monopolising the charcoal production and trade. The conditions for exclusive recognition of the local people are not yet guaranteed, nor the conditions for at least equity between the two groups in relation to opportunities to access the charcoal market and the political economy of it. The next section will show the effects of the misrecognition process on local producers’ ability to shape the political economy of charcoal or citizenship, and how this influences their self-image or identity.
Effects of the politics of misrecognition on citizenship
This section demonstrates how ‘local producers’, after being invented by the Forest Department and intervention policies through regulations as a category of belonging, are being fixed in real practices as a firm identity through differentiated absence of citizenship and an eroded imagination of self.
The effects of misrecognition on forest villagers’ citizenship
The politics of recognition of state institutions shape the citizenship of the existing social groups. In the forest sector, the weakening of local producers’ citizenship is effected by limiting their production performance and weakening their representation by decision-making powers.
In 2008, the decentralisation of quota distribution through the creation of the negotiation meeting to set charcoal production contracts bore a tempting promise that local producers would be better off politically and economically. The negotiation meeting aimed at decentralising the allocation of quota from the national to the local, thereby increasing local voices in the process. It was presented as the annual event where the urban merchants, through their national union leaders, would be bargaining with local producers’ leaders to obtain a delegated right to produce and trade part of the total charcoal potential within their community forests. Such negotiations result in a contract that determines the production quota left to urban merchants, the sites of production and the conditions for production to occur.
In practice, local producers in 2008 demonstrated high production performances by achieving 75% of the total charcoal potential of their community forests. In 2009, on the advice of frontline (at the sites of production) forest agents who accused villagers of having untransparent deals with urban merchants and their migrant workers, the Forest Department decided that the charcoal quota for the competing group would now be based on frontline forest agents’ annual assessments of the production performance of the groups (merchants and local producers). Villagers that hired migrant woodcutters would be fined and their production quotas downsized or even confiscated. At the same time, the 2010 ME decree permitted urban merchants to hire a higher number of migrant woodcutters. As a result, merchants produced far more than local producers ever could, and thus received much greater quotas than the latter. The negotiation meeting did not therefore achieve its original promise. New legal and practical mechanisms from foresters served to circumvent the goals of donors, projects and government officials to give local people control over the whole charcoal market.
One of the mechanisms of frontline foresters in Tambacounda to reduce the local producers’ scope of production was to invent the so-called jackpot system.9 It had two versions between 2010 and 2013. The first version consisted of splitting the total production potential into two sub-quotas (Q = q1 + q2): q1 was the total quota to be advanced to both local producers and the merchants, while the q2 was to be allocated in the middle of the charcoal season around April or May. Then q1 was also divided into q1′ for the local producers and q1″ for the merchants. The Regional Forest Service Office said it estimated q1′ and q1″ according to the production performance (p) of each group the year before. Subdivision also applied to q2 (q2′ for the local producers and q2″ for the merchants). To estimate q2′ and q2″, frontline foresters introduced a mid-term assessment of the performance of each group and decided that q1′ and q1″ but also q2′ and q2″ could be reallocated to the opposing group if the group had not completed its share by the due date.
This last arrangement discriminated against local producers in favour of the merchants, since their production performance depended on the number of woodcutters they hired. Hence, part of q1′ was reallocated to the merchants, given that the performance of the local people was weak and production speed was slow because they could not hire migrant woodcutters. Following the reallocation, the merchants could have their quota increased, constituted by their initial q1″ plus the leftovers deducted from the initial q1′ of the local producers. Practically, this meant that the forest merchants got their own quota plus the quota that local producers could not complete due to constraints imposed on them. When the advanced sub-quota (q1) was over, the remaining part of total quota (q2) came into play. Of course, q2 shunted the profits to forest merchants as it was allocated according to the production performance in the first stage. This implied again that merchants recruited more migrant woodcutters and could increase their performance in order to gain more quotas the upcoming year. This version of the jackpot quota was applied in 2010 and 2011. Because of the complaints from local producers, supported by the Wula Nafaa, the jackpot system officially stopped. However, in practice, it was still applied in Tambacounda until the end of my fieldwork in 2013, under the name of ‘quota advance’ instead of ‘jackpot’. Whether labelled ‘jackpot’ or ‘quota advance’, the two systems had the same effects on local producers.
Discourse played an important role in the making or changing of regulations. While both jackpot and advance systems were justified by the discourse of the need for a constant and stable supply of the cities with charcoal, the ban on local producers hiring migrant workers raised a discourse of sustainability (Interview with ‘Blablaba Deputy’, 9 August 2012 at Tambacounda).
The supply discourse says that without merchants, there would be charcoal shortage in the cities. Foresters interviewed argued that forest merchants perform better than local producers, therefore they are the only group that can ensure regular charcoal supply. However, this is not true, because merchants do not personally produce charcoal, but hire numerous migrant workers. When I indicated this contradiction to some of interlocutors in the Forest Service and projects, they replied usually as follows:
They cannot hire woodcutters because we have spent a lot of money training them in how to make charcoal and trade it; it would be a waste of money and time for us if they just hire like merchants. (Interview with ‘Scientist’, a high-rank official at the National Directorate of Forest Planning and Production, 24 July 2012, Dakar)
The sustainability discourse draws on the belief that the local producers, because they are autochthons, would care more about forest protection than the migrant workers.
There is also a citizenship discourse, because foresters argue that merchants are Senegalese like local producers, and so they must also have the right to access any (public) forest in Senegal wherever it is (Interviews by the author, 2012–2013). Discrimination in favour of the merchants is officially set out in the 2013 annual decree which states that ‘for reasons of equity, positive discrimination regarding the initial quota will be given to forest merchants that fulfilled their 2012 quota’ (ME/DEFCCS 2013, Article 16).
As local producers could not reach lucrative markets because they lacked quota and permits, the majority of them sold at forest edges to a growing group of non-licensed (informal) merchants called banabana. The prices varied from US$3 to a maximum of US$5 per sack (Survey by author in 2013 and in winter 2014). From the original promise of making them into market actors, local producers came to be confined to survival strategies: just producing a specific quantity and selling it to meet spontaneous basic needs. Charcoal production, legal or illegal, became a subsistence activity, whether quotas and permits were available or not. Out of 24 producers randomly chosen in three villages (the earliest sites where the PROGEDE programme took place were selected), only three ever sold directly in Dakar.
Another mechanism of frontline foresters to circumvent the objective of giving local producers control of the charcoal market was to downsize the ability of elected local governments to shape charcoal production decisions. Indeed, the PCRs were restricted to the limited role of witnessing the production contracts during negotiation meetings. Although they attended the negotiation meetings, they could not influence the decisions, while local producers’ leaders were unable to oppose or change the proposals of frontline forest agents who used their technical powers to push through their proposals. In March 2013, I asked a local leader who was unhappy about local producers’ quota after the 2012 meeting the following question: ‘Why did you sign the contracts if you were unsatisfied with the quota the frontline foresters allocated to local people?’ He responded: ‘You don’t understand. Those foresters are sons of bitches. I would rather stop doing charcoal business, [because] if I countered them in the presence of forest merchants I would never ever get permits!’
This response shows that local producers’ leaders failed to fully represent their colleagues; PCRs just attended, with no say in the decisions. If they managed to have any influence, they were threatened, as was the case in the 2011 negotiation meeting. Complaining of not having received the draft contract and protocols that forest merchants had received two weeks earlier, PCRs recommended that the meeting be postponed so that they could read the contracts carefully, rather than signing blindly.10 The then head of the Regional Forest Office replied warning them to be ready to bear the consequences of their acts, as he would be reporting to local producers that they could not produce charcoal that year because their PCRs had refused to sign the contracts. This obviously induced them to sign. How can an elected authority bear the responsibility of blocking its constituents from earning money, compromising their chances for upcoming elections, especially in a place where charcoal-making has become a subsistence activity?
Unlike local producers, the merchants, through their national trade organisation – the Union nationale des exploitants forestiers du sénégal (UNCEFS) – were able to influence the decisions about charcoal access and trade. Furthermore, UNCEFS has also contributed to the challenges producers face by imposing new rules for the charcoal market. UNCEFS increased the legal charcoal truckload from 300 sacks to 400, and that decision was adopted in the following annual decree as in 2010, 2011 and 2013. Thus, local producers who struggled to fill a 300-sack-truckload had to step up to 400. Those who were able to do this and went to Dakar had their charcoal purchased on credit without due reimbursement by the wholesalers.
There is suspicion that merchants have convinced the wholesalers to refuse to pay local producers in order to keep them in the forest-edge market. In an UNCEFS report it was stated that: ‘there are ill-intentioned businessmen that seek to enter the charcoal market for their own economic interests’ (UNCEFS 2003, 2). Indeed, merchants claim to operate for public service delivery. Using that excuse, they clearly work to keep a monopoly on the charcoal market. There is no doubt that they are unhappy seeing PROGEDE opening up the charcoal market to the local people who they are blocking by whatever strategy they perceive as efficient (Ribot and Faye 2007, 2010). Of course, competition among entrepreneurs is quite normal in any market. However, it becomes a problem of social justice and democracy when the public institution that mediates market interrelations favours one group over the others, as the Forest Department’s offices are doing in this case.
Despite the fact that the decentralisation laws and forestry code give elected local authorities the power to manage the forests, both village committee leaders and their political representatives were misrecognised by the Forest Department through the various legal ordinances that have been published between 2008 and now. The decision-making power on charcoal has gone back to foresters through the theatrical so-called negotiation meeting. Likewise, the market opportunities are still retained by some frontline foresters in favour of the merchants whom they ally with for untransparent deals including bribes and corruption (Ribot and Faye 2010; Blundo 2011, 380–382). The urge for regular charcoal supply to cities and for sustainability are the powerful discourses that justify this social injustice. The constellation of forest villager versus urban merchant ability to influence the polity (citizenship) negatively impacts local producers’ self-image, as is shown below.
The effects of misrecognition on forest villagers’ identity
Misrecognition of a group and the subsequent ‘maldistribution’ it implies reflect the negative assignments of those who govern (state authorities) on that group on the one hand, and on the other hand, this erodes the group’s self-perception (Englund 2004).
The real implication of the misrecognition process is that local producers are being restricted to the production stage and excluded from the urban market simultaneously. Local producers are now increasingly feeling disadvantaged compared to the merchants, giving them the sense that they are not considered Senegalese citizens to the same extent as the merchants. A leader from a forest management committee who thinks this way stated that:
Foresters do not take us seriously; they just deal with forest merchants who have money for them. It seems we’re not Senegalese like them. However well the projects do, as long as foresters control the permits, we will not make significant profits from charcoal. (Interview with ‘Mystic-man’, March 2012 in Kolomba, Tambacounda region)
On being asked why he didn’t sell his charcoal in Dakar, he continued:
How can you ask somebody who is encountering problems in producing charcoal to bring that charcoal to the cities, passing under the noses of foresters along the road? They will accuse me of fraud at any time or not respecting the management plan, confiscating my charcoal or requesting an amount I could not afford. Dakar is for forest merchants; badoolos [poor peasants] stay here. (Ibid.)
Obviously, foresters and the Ministry of Environment label villagers as ‘local producers’, giving them a specific identity and particular politics of recognition. Consequently, local producers now perceive themselves as belonging to a unique group that is entitled with rights to decision-making and, at the same time, having a negative image that relegates them to the production stage rather than having access to the lucrative urban market. Therefore, ‘local producer’ is actually both a political identity and economic status resulting from regulations and practices well embedded in foresters’ discourses.
Discussion and conclusion
This article has analysed the politics of recognition and their redistributive aspects, and how those politics have shaped the citizenship and identity of forest villagers, starting from the 1996 decentralisation reform to date, in the forest sector and charcoal market in particular. The results have demonstrated that recognition and redistribution are interlocked (Fraser 2000), if not subsumed, that is, inseparably merged together (Honneth 1992). However, the ‘redistributive’ features and effects of the politics of recognition are observable when the lens of the recognition analysis is combined with an analysis of ‘ability to shape the fate of the polity’ or citizenship (Isin and Turner 2002; Ribot 2007; Ribot, Chhatre and Lankina 2008). Such an analytical combination has demonstrated that recognition shapes the ability to shape the fate of the political economy that determines the livelihood and well-being of social groups, which mutually influence their identities.
This approach has also shown that recognition, misrecognition, and non-recognition have porous and temporal boundaries. The case of the forest village people proved that possible movement: they were not recognised before the intervention of forest management projects, but then they were recognised during the implementation of decentralisation and projects thereof, and they have ended up being misrecognised since 2008 with a peak in 2010, the date they became branded as ‘local producers’. The movement depends on the dynamics of environmental policies that regulate access to the market and power distribution in forest policy, which themselves are devised by the Forest Department in Senegal.
In turn, both policy and market forces impacted groups’ ability to influence decision-making processes, that is, citizenship. Recognition also affects the identity of the recognised, nonrecognised or misrecognised groups. When citizenship is understood as a group-based status tied to specific rights and resources, identity is thus politically manufactured and is not only a culturally bounded category like religion, caste, ethnicity, and so on (Ndegwa 1998; Benda-Beckman and Benda-Beckman 2010; Hochet 2012). As this case shows, identity can be shaped through the mobilisation of regulations and practices cast in a political and conservation discourse.
Identities are, at the same time, the groups’ self-perception (Wollenberg, Anderson and López. 2005) and internalisation by those of the image and status to which they are assigned (such as ‘local producer’) by higher political-economic structures. By this, I mean they are artefacts of the policy-makers and implementers, and the images become further internalised by the concerned groups. This case has shown how misrecognition of forest villagers by the Forest Department, in classifying them into the limiting category of local producers, has resulted in weakening their citizenship and eroding their self-image in relation to their place and role in the charcoal market and policies.
Therefore, in addition to limiting citizenship, misrecognition does harm to and damages the groups’ freedom of being (identity). When a group is misrecognised, its image is eroded, as also observed by Honneth (1992), Englund (2004) and Taylor (1992). Patterson (1999) also concluded that the loss of the right to participate in the polity led people in rural Senegal to start doubting their role in the global society. Misrecognition is damaging for the well-being of the misrecognised group.
In democracies like Senegal, the politics of recognition and their underlying acts of distribution are channelled through laws, while the acts of misrecognition and their underlying maldistribution come up through the mediums of executive and administrative day-to-day regulations, and practices on the ground. Why it is so? It is because laws are visible and are often influenced by the global commitments of developing world countries and by donors’ interventions in national policy-making processes (by means and justification of funding). ‘Hidden agendas’ (Scott 1985) of states and of their administrative and technical bodies unfold only in the ‘backstage’ (Goffman 1959) of decentralisation through regulations and ground practices. The real agenda of the Forest Service is to have geopolitical visibility through laws and to secure donor funding through the expansion of forest management plans, while ‘turning around forestry policy’ (Ribot 1995) through decrees and circulars and practices as well.
Interestingly, laws, regulations and practices are legitimised through the mobilisation of discourses; all of them constantly favouring domination by the powerful actors (Poteete and Ribot 2011) and promoting recentralisation through decentralisation (Ribot, Agrawal, and Larson 2006). But the scale on which discourses are revealed differ depending on who is targeted. For example, the sustainability and supply (as public delivery) discourses are showcased to attract donors and the funding they distribute. The Forest Service mobilises both discourses at local level to legitimise favouring private forest merchants over local producers. The discourses of sustainability and supply are supported by a formal citizenship or an autochthony discourse, which is attractive for (autochthone) people, who perceive it as supportive of their access to the nearby resources.
The narrative of autochthony that has been instrumentalised by the Forest Service and projects could, furthermore, be a reason for brutal exclusion of migrants because this carries a high potential for conflicts among the groups involved. Senegal should draw lessons from the damaging effects of the autochthony-based discourse in Kenya between Kalenjin and Kikuyu in 1992, in Rwanda 1994 between Tutsi and Hutu, and recently in Côte d’Ivoire in 1997 (Bayart, Geschiere, and Nyamnjoh 2001, 178–179) and the very violent attacks on migrants in South Africa in 2008 and 2015.
The discourse on formal citizenship or autochthony, which is usually mobilised by current global policies and implemented by national-level policies, neither guarantees better conversation on natural resources nor the formation of local democracy and the social justice that is expected to feature it.