Environmentality and the making of compliant subjects: Insights from collaborative forest management innovations in Southwestern Ghana

Abstract

Shifting from a coercive to a collaborative approach that engenders equity in processes and outcomes from forest management remains an aspiration in forest governance in many countries. Whereas several studies have analyzed how national policy changes and international developments collectively influence this change, the nature of the subjects created by the transition remains an open question. Drawing on the literature on governmentality and environmentality, we develop a framework along a compliant-resistance axis to analyze the different subjects created by two collaborative forest management innovations in Ghana: the modified taungya system and community forest monitoring. Analyzing data from 37 key informant interviews and three focus groups in a priority biodiversity hotspot of the country, the Krokosua Hills Forest Reserve, we identified four main types of subjects emerging from both initiatives: participatory, transformative, opportunistic and passive. Opportunistic subjects embrace both initiatives as a legitimate cover to encroach upon and convert various forest reserve areas to farmlands. Transformative subjects, such as environpreneurs, leverage both initiatives to establish "green businesses" that support forest rehabilitation and provide non-forest products, reducing people's dependency on the protected area. However, the subjects we identified neither adequately question the power of the state or non-governmental organizations over forest management nor challenge the inequalities these actors create when they restrict forest-fringe communities' access to their local environment while simultaneously opening these spaces to timber contractors and foreign investors under various schemes. Understanding the conditions that enable forest-fringe communities to overcome this challenge is an area for further study. Such insights are essential for promoting equity in ways that repair relationships between power-differentiated actors and their local environment, ultimately enabling nature recovery.