Adding scepticism about ‘environmentality’: Gender exclusion through a natural resources collectivization initiative in dionewar, Senegal

Abstract

Research on the commons has demonstrated the capacity of local people to define efficient common resource management institutions and organizations that enforce them. However, little is still known about the motivations of the actors that craft bottom-up institutions. Environmentality proponents tie such motivations to the environmental awareness coming from local participation in previous governmental interventions in natural resource governance. This chapter is a critique of the environmentality concept. Therefore, it argues that the ability and knowledge to develop environmental institutions comes mostly from the capacity to tap into environmental discursive strategies and to articulate them with other dominative discourses rather than from participation in previous project interventions. Those dominant actors craft new rules to suit their own interests rather than developing envionmental sensitivities. Drawing from ethnographic research in Senegal's Saloum Islands, the chapter demonstrates that young men, despite the fact that they have never been involved in development interventions, by idealizing collective interest have formulated very sophisticated ideologies to manipulate women who participated in any projects in the area. The reputation of women in Dionewar is both a social construct and a result of a changing (environmental) context. The collective-interest-idealized initiative (collectivization) created gender exclusion, increased gender-based conflicts about access to a wild fruit called to oy and fostered privatization.