Rethinking elite persistence in neoliberalism: Foresters and techno-bureaucratic logics in Mexico’s community forestry

• DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.03.018
• Publication Date: 2018-03-31T01:19:54Z
• Authors: Gustavo A. García...
• Keywords: 0211 other engineering and technologies; 02 engineering and technology; 15. Life on land; 16. Peace & justice

Abstract Problems of elite capture continue to present challenges for sustainable and equitable forest governance around the world. Our understanding of elite capture, however, remains limited by conceptual approaches that pay insufficient attention to power in its various dimensions. Drawing on critical institutionalism and political ecology, I analyze how the power veiled in political-economic structures or ‘power fields’, embedded with local institutions and relations of conflict and negotiation, helps (re)produce elite power and persistence. I pay particular attention to the role of foresters as crucial yet understudied elite actors in community forestry. I employ an over-time comparative case study of processes of elite capture in four regional inter-community forestry associations (FAs) in the state of Durango, Mexico. I argue that foresters’ persistent capture of FAs is related to multi-layered power inequalities and persistent democratic deficits reproduced by techno-bureaucratic forestry and authoritarian corporatist logics. At the same time, I posit that this capture is not definite but is continually transformed by social struggles and grassroots institutional innovations.