ABSTRACT
This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical perspectives and contemporary challenges shaping the politics of global sustainability and associated power dynamics in African forests. The book brings together original contributions focusing on many aspects of domination-marginalization patterns that alter, determine or transform the governance of forestland resources – at different levels in Africa from the colonial to contemporary periods. The book also reveals that these major trends of asymmetric actors’ power relations and inequalities co-exist with more complex and ambiguous relations, where the apparent weak or marginalized actors are sometimes able to resist the domination of the powerful actors. Beyond classical approaches in analysing power from a single perspective of domination or path dependency, this book brings empirical evidence and contrasting views on the capacity, in certain circumstances, of marginalized actors to resist domination. Building on case studies analysed in the book, power dynamics are analysed as complex phenomena and non-linear processes of influence involving a set of actors with varied resources, abilities and strategies who can act or react at different timescales to secure their interests or defending specific ideas. Eventually, the book provides an analytical framework to explain what happens when domination strategies meet tactics of resistance, especially in postcolonial contexts.
