Contested firewood collection in Burkina Faso: Governance, perceptions, and practices
通过定性研究，探讨布基纳法索两个村庄中女性与森林管理员对薪柴采集的认知，揭示森林治理如何排斥女性决策权，并指出控制式管理对森林砍伐效果存疑。
This qualitative study explores how forest governance is perceived and embodied in everyday firewood practices in two rural villages in Burkina Faso. The study specifically looks into women’s and forest guard’s perceptions of firewood collection, access to wood, and the state regulations in place. Such exploration is helpful for showing how women who rely on firewood for their livelihoods respond to and perceive regulations, the synthesizing efforts, and the environmental impacts of firewood collection. To situate the interrelations of forest institutions, perceptions, and practices, the study draws on a critical institutional and feminist political ecology approach. Such an approach sheds light on how firewood governance in Burkina Faso excludes women from deciding over a resource they rely on for everyday life. Moreover, the approach helped illuminate how management by control, monitoring, and sensitizing efforts have a questionable impact on deforestation in forest commons. The study departs from that firewood practices as shaped by institutional complexity and historical, cultural, and taken-for-granted ways of doing, and this impacts how forest governance plays out on the ground. By exploring the discursive and the actual practices, the study contributes insights into the discrepancies between forest law enforcement and women’s perceptions of firewood collection. Such analysis advances understanding of how forest governance in Burkina Faso is embodied and internalized in how people relate to and use firewood and the complex and varying ways firewood practices are formed. The findings suggest that women should be included in forest management, receive technical training in forest practices, and that attention should be directed toward decreasing firewood dependence.