Transnational self-help networks and community forestry: A theoretical framework

Abstract

Global forest governance is generally analyzed as highly fragmented, meaning that it involves a multiplicity of actors and institutions. This fragmentation may be one explanation of the proliferation of multiple discourses around forest governance produced by some dominant actors. In this context, community forestry organizations are seeking, through their association in the form of transnational self-help networks, to promote alternative discourses around their own model of communitarian governance. These recent experiences question the traditional concepts and approaches that only consider community forestry organizations at the local scale.Based on a transnational political sociology perspective and on concrete experiences from Mesoamerica, this paper aims to present an innovative analytical framework to understand how transnational self-help networks of community forestry contribute to transform norms of forest governance through their discourses. It aims in particular to capture the mechanisms leading to the translation of norms between scales and the production of discourse coalitions within the network. The goal is finally to consider transnational self-help networks of community forestry as full-fledged actors within global forest governance, with the capacity to transform the nature of key norms of governance, particularly those directly affecting their own model.