Contribution short abstract

This contribution analyses how the breakdown of the social contract around forest protection in Senegal, between forest agents and local communities, has generated community disengagement, abrupt competition over resources and acts of sabotage and smuggling.

Contribution long abstract

Compliant with Senegal’s decentralisation policy, frontline communities are often tasked with the operational responsibilities, including forest surveillance – what is usually known as “responsabilisation” in French. While this surveillance work is theoretically benevolent, the watchmen receive symbolic financial incentives. However, local communities’ responsabilisation in forest surveillance reveals a breakdown of the social contract on which forest governance rests and contestation of the legitimacy of public forest agents, by both forest watchmen, local authorities and most villagers. This chapter demonstrates how the breakdown of the social contract and the popular explanations for this breakdown have not only generated community disengagement and abrupt competition over resources but also led to acts of sabotage and smuggling as well as a blame game among the parties. It aims at describing these acts as a “return to the state of nature” which compromises forest ecosystem protection and conservation. Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork and experience of offering technical assistance, over the last twelve years, to various civil society organizations and international agencies intervening in Senegal’s forest sector, I analyze the highly mediatized illegal rosewood harvesting at the border between Senegal and the Gambia and charcoal production respectively in Kolda and Tambacounda regions.