Negotiating Locality: Decentralization and Communal Forest Management in the Guatemalan Highlands

Abstract

Decentralization is a political process, concerned with the distribution of power, resources, and administrative capacities across national territories. This research analyzes nominal decentralization of the forest sector in Guatemala, where recent legislation situates administrative power and territorial control of communal forests at the municipal level. We explore the local implications of this legislation, especially for communal forest management, in the context of historical power asymmetries between competing localities and the state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and historical analysis of public policy in several municipalities in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, we suggest that decentralization policies at times diffuse centralization and actually increase state power at the local level, putting at risk and even weakening successful village-level forest governance structures and local livelihoods.