Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a new approach for analysing bottom-up institution building processes (examples from fisheries in Zambia and forestry in Mali) that are important in the context of decentralisation policies in Africa and links governance resource issues with local institution building.

Paper long abstract:

There is a gap in the literature on institution building regarding local perceptions of common pool resource management in the context of decentralised governance (Ostrom pers. com 2011). Ostrom's work highlights the way successful institutions work and which aspects are important for their success (Ostrom 1990, 2005). In addition, others scholars such as Jean Ensminger have highlighted the role that the bargaining power of actors and ideology play in the institution-building process and resource governance (Ensminger 1992, 1998; Haller ed 2010). However, there is very little research on how local actors themselves view (i.e. emically) an institution-building process in retrospective. Based on two case studies (fisheries in Zambia and forestry management in Mali) we propose a new analytical approach that stems from real cases of recent self-driven institution building, in which emic views become apparent. We label such self-driven processes as constitutionality, which is defined as a conscious process of formal institution building from below, which does not suffer from the drawbacks of top-down imposed processes of democratisation, decentralisation and participation, which are often subject to processes of elite capture. Contesting the view that subjects internalise governmentally imposed frames of viewing the world by 'participating' in institutions, as in Agrawal's (2005) model of environmentality for resource governance, based on a Foucauldian notion of governmentality, our perspective (based on practice theory and New Institutionalism) emphasises instead how local actors construct a sense of ownership in the institution-building process by strategically pursuing local interests through that process for decentralised resource governance.