‘We live in darkness in broad daylight’– Assemblage, legality, and the politics of resilience in community forest management in Burkina Faso

Community forestry seeks to reconcile livelihoods, conservation, and collective governance, yet how institutional arrangements shape collective adaptive capacities remains insufficiently understood. We examine how the assembling, operation, and reconfiguration of a community-managed forest – a Chantier d'aménagement forestier (CAF) – in Burkina Faso shaped local capacities for adaptive forest management. Drawing on qualitative methods including interviews, focus groups, participatory timelines, and transect walks, we combine assemblage analysis with a social–ecological resilience perspective to empirically examine innovation, flexibility, and co-learning. Results show that formal institutional persistence alone cannot sustain the collective adaptive capacity underpinning social–ecological resilience. Administrative coordination around fuelwood production and sale did not ensure shared decision-making authority, downward accountability, or institutionalized co-learning. Selective procedural enforcement and unequal access to regulatory documents, financial information, training, and external networks constrained community representatives' capacity to scrutinize decisions and revise ineffective practices. Locally devised adaptations faced administrative resistance, while influential actors retained discretion. Direct fuelwood transactions enabled immediate payment and price renegotiation but weakened monitoring and collective revenues. Customary land reclamation, agricultural conversion, commercial land transfers, and emerging market alliances reconfigured territorial authority and fragmented governance. The study advances assemblage scholarship by showing how legality, enacted through documentation and expertise under unequal information access, can consolidate administrative authority while destabilizing relationships sustaining collective governance. Policy should combine negotiated territorial rights, accountability, accessible regulatory and financial information, and inclusive learning with payment arrangements that protect livelihoods and finance collective forest management.