Institutional Choices and Local Custom in Minyankala, Southeastern Mali

Abstract

"Ngo's institutional choices are not only choices. They are action implemented in social and political contexts also. In Koury the Intercooperation's Gdrn project choose to transform a pastoral association into a pastoral-agriculturists union to plan a regional pastoral survey. Articulated with the decentralized administrative divisions and communes the set Union/Survey has to resolve disputes, negotiate fittings and integrate Fulani in the Minyanka society. But Koury is mainly featured by two dynamics: a power quest upon Minyanka former villages by powerful Dafin lineages through land colonization and the reinvention of local history; and a reduction of pastoral resources users' groups from the supra-village resource sharing to the intra-village one. The lack of understanding of these features conduce the project to envisage and to put institutions into practice which do not enable the decentralized democratic and participative pastoral resources management targeted. It conduces to practices of institutional diversion by dominants to strengthen their power, to enforce their strategies, to get opportunistic behaviors legally backed."