Changing Trees, Enduring Forests: Institutional Bricolage, Gradual Change and Community Forestry among Yucatec Mayans in Mexico

Abstract

This article seeks to understand why community forestry enterprises in the Mayan rainforest of Mexico are losing ground, while middlemen and manufacturers are regaining control over forestry resources. It focuses on the case of the Ejido San Felipe Oriente where an NGO codesigned a commercialization platform with the objective of bringing together local cooperatives to negotiate in the market from a position of strength. The project was hampered by an internal rupture in the ejido; in investigating this rupture, the authors use the concept of institutional bricolage to understand local power struggles, and the theory of gradual change to search for historical causal mechanisms. They find that the proximate causes of the rupture were family rivalries, suspicions of embezzlement, unfair exclusions, and the disruption of customary practices regarding the distribution of monetary benefits. However, historical continuities lay beneath the power struggle: ejidos in the Yucatan Peninsula have used their function as intermediaries to subordinate local interests rather than promote endogenous development. The authors advocate for an institutional design process that takes account of the unconscious and taken‐for‐granted meanings that influence institutional adaptation; they encourage development practitioners promoting community forestry enterprises in the Mayan rainforest of Mexico to address historical continuities in local institutions as a focal target of development interventions.