2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

When and why do people perceive rules governing access to and distribution of our planet’s natural resources as legitimate? In reaction to previously failed state-centered as well as market-oriented environmental policies, the 1990s witnessed the global spread of decentralized and community-based approaches emphasizing the importance of local participation for perceptions of legitimacy. This, in turn, was thought to increase the sustainable and equitable management of our planet’s natural resources. In this paper, I use Uganda – a state that underwent one of the most far-reaching local government programs in the world – as an exemplifying case to illustrate unintended consequences of the state’s decentralization efforts in regard to its population’s perceived legitimacy of rules governing fish and land resources. Drawing on seven months of empirical field research, I show that decentralized governance in Uganda created a fragmented landscape of institutions, functions and responsibilities that created a permissive environment for two mechanisms of discursive power, namely ‘scapegoating’ and ‘tribalizing’, to take hold. By allowing actors to shift responsibilities from one governance level to another and by opening a constitutive space for politicized ethnic identities, these discursive mechanisms help shape perceptions of when and why rules are perceived as legitimate or not. I argue that in the case of Uganda, decentralized environmental governance resulted in an institutional landscape, in which these discursive mechanisms are hurting rather than contributing to the sustainable and equitable management of the country’s natural resources. By emphasizing the influence of discursive power for the acceptance and implementation of environmental policies, this paper seeks to contribute to a growing and interdisciplinary body of literature addressing the role and mechanisms of legitimacy for natural resource governance systems.