Concessionary Politics

Abstract

The origin of concessionary politics that shape forest use and management in equatorial Africa can be traced to precolonial and colonial practices. Yet these political processes are constantly being reinvented, and their consequences for ecological and social systems reach far into the future. Gleaned from fieldwork among residents of a protected area and logging zone in Central African Republic (CAR), this concept relates village-level analysis of traditional governance to national and international adoptions of legal concessions of land for the management of natural resources. Constituted through specific phases of prospecting, delimiting, and negotiating control over labor and territory, concessions can be characterized by particular cultural practices: negotiation at local or regional levels of concessionary rights that have been formally ceded at a national level; patron-client relationships involving expatriates and/or traditional authorities that mediate or even replace governance by the nation-state; and fields of territorialized identity politics that tend toward relationships of rivalry and alliance across groups for redistribution of wealth through services, gifts, and performances of collective contestation or celebration. Through interpretive analysis of a national holiday celebration in CAR, I explore the legacies and transformations in concessionary politics shaping conservation and logging in that region more broadly and consider their implications for changing environmental governance in equatorial Africa.