Logging Comes to La Campa: State Intervention, Forest Transformation, and Collective Action

Prior to 1970, La Campa’s population did not perceive timber as a potentially valuable market commodity. Chapter 4 explores how these circumstances and perceptions changed as La Campa attempted to achieve development through logging. It traces the difficulties that ensued when the Honduran government nationalized trees and the people attempted to accommodate, and then resist, the abrogation of their common-property rights. With perspectives from collective-action theory and institutional analyses, the discussion examines the question, Who should manage forests? In La Campa’s case, both the national government and the community had shortcomings in their capacities to manage commercial forestry. The shortcomings of national institutional arrangements for logging constituted major factors in the rise of the resistance in La Campa. The analysis considers why Campeños were eventually successful in ending commercial forestry and how the macrolevel contexts of the Honduran state provided an opening for successful grassroots organization. La Campa’s experiences reveal some of the contradictions and complexities inherent in collective action; they also suggest how crisis can spur reassessment of traditional beliefs and encourage the emergence of new institutions.