Responsibilization and state territorialization: Governing socio-territorial conflicts in community forestry in Mexico

Community-based approaches to forest management and governance promised that transferred responsibilities to forest communities would create the conditions to achieve better conservation and a sustainable use of forest ecosystems, as well as social well-being and poverty reduction for the communities. This article examines the limitations of these approaches in contexts of ambiguous collective property rights and protracted inter-community socio-territorial conflicts, pointing to the responsibilization mechanisms that emerge and their consequences. Using institutional records, media coverage documents, and observations from ethnographic research in the Southern Sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, we look at the contemporary forms of responsibilization of local communities for their ‘well-being’, and explore the effects of such responsibilization in contexts where enforcement of collective property rights is weak, and people's access to natural resources and territories is limited by different government practice intended to “solve conflicts.” Drawing from post-structural political ecology and peace and conflict studies, we argue that governmental intervention in socio-territorial conflicts, mechanisms of responsibilization, and state re-territorialization are paradoxically intertwined in ways that hinder the collaborative features and natural-resource-management capabilities that community-based approaches ostensibly support. Four main practices sustain these mechanisms, (1) channeling disputants to sluggish and legalistic trials; (2) offering monetary compensation as the sole incentive to induce land-tenure settlement; (3) creating and perpetuating “gray” areas where community use of natural resources is restricted; and (4) dealing with weak enforcement of conflict-settlement agreements and collective property rights.