Conflict, Governance and Institutional Dynamics

This work package focuses on two sets of interrelated questions. The first addresses the emergence of new institutions and changes to existing ones. The second addresses the governance of natural resources between state actors, NGOs, and local actors within and across various local, regional, national, and international scales.
We consider institutions that shape the valuation, use, management, and transfer of natural resources (e.g. wildlife, plants, fish, and agricultural lands), including customary rules and examine critically the colonial and post-colonial roots of such frameworks. This work package will also address the strategic use of conservation by traditional authorities seeking to cement specific power relations as well as to secure incomes from conservation. We will also examine how their highly gendered basis for rule-making and public authority contrasts and conflicts with hegemonic internationally circulating ideas about how local natural resource management could be made more efficient, sustainable, participatory, gender-sensitive, and accountable.

Work package 2 addresses the following three sets of key questions:

1. How are traditional authorities involved in and by conservation institutions? How are projects (and their apparatuses) co-produced between local power brokers, national elites, governmental officers, and international actors?
2. How do new institutions develop, or does institutional bricolage emerge e.g. in efforts to institute new commons around specific natural resources (e.g. fish, timber, wildlife)?
3. How are different actors (educated/non-educated; young/old; men/women; local/migrant; rich/poor) involved in institutional dynamics and public governance? In what ways do such processes intersect, reproduce, or context various identities?