ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the concrete exercise of their discretionary powers, forest agents - who are formally accountable only to their superiors - are in reality greatly influenced by interventions from a plurality of formal and informal institutions and actors with the help of data collected during ethnographic research conducted from 2005 in the Forest Service in Niger and Senegal. It analyzes the consequences of these multiple logics of accountability on the behavior of officers and their uses of administrative procedures. The precise relation between the offender and the intercessor as well as the latter's social or political status determine the type of accountability mobilized by the intervention. The most recurrent are representational accountability, vicinal accountability, patron-client accountability and peer accountability. The chapter also demonstrates that civil servants react to situations of moral and normative double-bind by creating a range of practical norms, that is unofficial yet standardized procedures resulting from the merging of official, social and professional norms.
