Rethinking Power and Forestry Governance in Colonial and Post-Colonial Tanzania: Towards a Poststructural Political Ecology

Abstract

Abstract There is an emerging scholarly concern for reconstructing and engaging with diverse approaches that theorize the question of power. Scholars focusing on the Global South critically explore how power dynamics shaping forestry governances hold western colonial assumptions that erase complexities of nature-society relations. Yet, many studies have not systematically (re)conceptualized issues of knowledge-power nexus as an instrument of control and power through Foucauldian and coloniality lens in Tanzania. The review critically discusses politics and power by plotting it within environmentality and coloniality literature. It argues that postcolonial forestry governance is devoid of its colonial residue that seems to be visible in the current forestry governance regimes. It proposes an alternative critical constructivist approach that considers the role of knowledge production through which forest discourses as assemblages of power mechanisms are crucial in producing uneven social and ecological implications.