International and Domestic Sustainable Forest Management Policies: Distributive Effects on Power among State Agencies in Bangladesh

The last two decades of forest policy discussions have been dominated by calls for sustainable management of forest resources. Consequently, multiple international and domestic policies, supporting sustainable forest management (SFM), have evolved in numerous jurisdictions. Policies in developing countries often rely on foreign donors’ projects, which supplement domestic SFM policy. These policies assign various policy tasks to specific public bureaucracies, who then compete for these very tasks, as well as the related staff and budgets. Therefore, project and policy task assignment greatly influences bureaucratic power. This article analyzes the distributive effects of SFM policy on power (in terms of coercion, incentives and dominant information) among relevant domestic and foreign donor bureaucracies in Bangladesh. Concepts from power theory, bureaucratic politics theory, and concepts of policy and policy process were combined to analyze 121 Bangladeshi SFM policies from 1992–2013, which assign a total of 1012 policy tasks to specific public bureaucracies. Using qualitative content analysis, inferences about power were assigned to specific competing bureaucracies by the totality of SFM policies made. Results identify domestic and foreign bureaucracies whose power distribution benefit most from the SFM policies viz. their competitors. It is concluded that bureaucracies gaining the most power set the limits and directions in designing, implementing and evaluating various elements of any national SFM policies.