Negotiating Post‐Socialist PropertyandState: Struggles over Forests in Albania and Romania

Abstract

Since the demise of socialism, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced intense negotiations over access and property. This article uses four case studies on struggles over forest in Albania and Romania to examine how these negotiations intersect with processes constituting authority. The cases demonstrate significant variations in the configurations of property and authority regarding forest, but they also reflect the influence of national politics in the two countries. In Albania, custom not only competes with the state as an institution sanctioning rights to forest but actually emerges as an alternative politico-legal institution contesting state authority more broadly. In Romania, local struggles over forests play out the contestations between personalized and law-based exercises of state authority at the national level. These insights suggest that due to their radical nature and simultaneous occurrence, negotiations over property and authority have challenged the position of post-socialist states as primary politico-legal institutions and have generated different exercises of state authority.

How Does the Changing Access to Resources Affect the Power and Authority of the Postsocialist Romanian State?

“…So, like in Ribot's (1998) article on Senegal's charcoal trade, lack of technology, knowledge, credit and access to markets (i.e. market mechanisms) meant here that the legal owners were unable to extract the full extent of benefits which they were expecting (Hann, 1993;Verdery, 2003;Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel, 2009).…”

“…They are usually underlined by the competition between a personalized and a law-governed exercise of state authority (Hollis, 1999;Verdery, 1996Verdery, , 1999Verdery, , 2002Verdery, , 2003Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel, 2009). …”

“…What this review paper will be concerned with is the fact that the ensuing struggles over resources were also considered by academics to have played an important part in the formation of the postsocialist state (von Benda-Beckmann, 1981; Stark and Bruszt, 1998 various actors obtain power and maintain control over resources (Fortmann, 1995;Rocheleau and Ross, 1995;Sikor, 2006;Sikor and Lund, 2009;Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel, 2009). …”

“…To further compound the issue, along with this broad shift in resource governance came significant gaps between legislation and rights-in-practice (Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel, 2009;Sikor and Lund, 2009;Sikor, 2003). This discrepancy meant the exclusion of some interests in favour of the interests of those of more powerful individuals (Sikor, 2003), a situation which was widely reported in postsocialist and postcolonial case studies (Boone, 2003 It would therefore seem that Romania has been the witness of a diversity of changes in property and rural property relations, which have varied depending on which legal property rights overlapped with which rights-in-practice (de Waal, 1996; Giordano and Kostova, 1996; Verdery 1999; Sikor, 2003).…”

“…To make sense of these changes this review paper will make use of recent postsocialist literature, which links the access and control over resources to the exercise of power and authority in the postsocialist state (Berry, 1993;Lund, 2002;Verdery, 2002;Ribot and Peluso, 2003;Sikor, 2006;Sikor and Lund, 2009;Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel, 2009 (de Waal, 1996;Giordano and Kostova, 1996;Verdery, 1999;Rabinowicz and Swinnen, 1997; Swinnen and Mathjs, 1997;Szelenyi, 1998;Sikor, 2003;Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel, 2009;Dorondel and Sikor, 2009) (Lund, 2002). …”