Citizens, custodians, and villains: Environmentality and the politics of difference in Senegal's community forests

Decentralized natural resource governance in African nations has been accompanied by mounting struggles over resource entitlements framed around social identities. Dominant groups have justified exclusive control of resources by linking ethnic, gender, and generational status with claims about who is a responsible resource-user and who is a despoiler. The literature on environmentality has highlighted the central role that "environmental subjects" play in decentralized resource regimes. Yet too often, critical scholarship on environmental beliefs and practices has framed power in terms of domination and resistance, neglecting the ways that individuals' embrasures of environmental subject positions entail multivarious power relations. This paper situates environmental subjectivities as a constituent part of the politics of identity, property, and authority, drawing on feminist theories of subjectivity and the framework of articulating identity. Through an ethnographic investigation of community forest management in central Senegal, I examine how villagers constructed subject positions incorporating environmental discourses and their own identity-inflected experiences and interests. Two main subject positions emerged: a group of senior men positioned themselves as community custodians, while autochthonous-identifying villagers asserted their status as environmental citizens. These subject positions had important political effects: by serving as custodians, senior men partially reconstituted their patriarchal authority over kin; meanwhile, environmental citizenship helped autochthonous groups to exclude "second-comers" from village lands. This paper argues that research on environmental subjectivities should look beyond governmental projects and situate subject formation as part of long-term, place-based struggles over identities, rights, and authority.