Ironies of Consociation: Forest and Natural Resource Governance in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), on southeastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, is a unique product of international peace building based on a consociational model of ethnic power sharing. Organized around protection of “vital interests” of its constituent ethnic communities, the BiH state is radically decentralized. In forest administration, national government is practically nonexistent; multiple substate entities including cantons and municipalities operate as autonomous, self-governing units. This paper finds that the politics of accommodation, ironically couched in the language of rights, creates conditions of illiberal dissociation which block consensual natural resource governance. Conservation policies which require political compromise, thus, face a challenge in BiH’s illiberal consociation. Through policy analysis and interviews with representatives of key organizations affected by the 2008 Law on Una National Park, this study finds that when policies are implemented at levels of expected cooperation, the resultant needs are to reconcile rifts of interpretation and coordinate competencies vertically among dissociative bureaucracies.