THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

We shall use the term participation in following the sense of Donnelly-Roark. Participation as
a concept is used to mean power-sharing in decision-making. Participation must include real
devolution of significant powers. Despite its problematic nature, we use the term community
to mean a well dissected area of a geographically specified local population. 409 The concept of
participation waded through the third World at the dawn of the 1990s. This was after the state
weathered from a progressive force of change and modernisation to a backward, primordial
arena of neo-patrimonialism, dictatorship, corruption and greed, hindering far reaching
development. 410
Therefore, when we talk of local decentralisation and local particiapation in natural resource
usage, we drift away from the earlier notion of people and local communities being perceived
as bad environmental managers or natural resource villains. 411 We also tactfully move away
from Hardin’s tragedy of commons where communities are perceived to take part in
destroying nature through ignorance selfishness and greed. 412 But we are rather moving to a
dimension where people – environmental relationship is central. We look at people, their local
knowledge and affinity with nature as strong drivers to save the earth's threatened biological
resources. 413 Local decentralisation and participatory approaches to environment and
development received a great boost from the state-society oscillation. The two notions
emerged from a long history of distress, characterised by failed and frustrating top-down
approaches. This “new” phenomenon which is largely a product of social movements notion
of biodiversity, centered on indigenous rights, anti-statist sentiments of both the left and the
right, structural adjustment agendas and fiscal cries of post-Cold War Third World states. 414
Local participatory development has become a means to incorporate civil society into the
decisions formerly reserved for state policy elites. Now that the heavy weight of the state is
sowly weathering away, decentralisation and local decision-making are inadvertently seen as
routes by which control is being transferred from one power centre to another. The process
entails local accountability, decision-making, benefit sharing, transfer of discretionary powers
as well as local legislation and legal framing, to which we now turn.
It was found out that many programs in Kakamega district approach local resource users
groups such as woodcutters, pastoralists, farmers, women's or youth associations as a way of
enlisting local participation in form of legislation and legal framing. These groups, however,
409
Donnelly-Roark, P. 1997. Reinventing Decentralisation Burkinabe Style: progress and Strategy notes'.
Mimeo.
410
Ferguson, J. 1998. Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond "the State" and "Civil Society" in the
Study of African politics'.Draft Mimeo: Department of Anthropology, University of California.
411
Ehrlich, P.R. 1978. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.
412
Banuri,T, and F. A, Margolin. 1993. Who will Save the Forests? Knowledge, Power and Environmental
Destruction. London: Zed Books.
413
Downs, R. E., and Reyna, S. P. 1988. Land and Society in Contemporary Africa. Hanover: University Press
of New England.
414
Rasmussen, T. 1986. The Green Revolution in the Southern Highlands. In Tanzania: Crisis and Struggle For
survival, edited by J. Boesen, K. Havnevik, J. Koponen, and R. Odgaard, 191-205. Uppsala: Scandinavian
Institute of African Studies.
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