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The paper analyses the administration of forest use in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the complex trans-imperial transition from Ottoman control to Austrian-Hungarian Empire 1878-1908. Bosnian forests covered 50 % of the territory and were of immense socio-economic importance. The Austrian-Hungarian administration considered them the largest source of revenue and epicenter of its modernization project, envisioning a state-managed administrative hold on them. At the same time, however, the local population’s livelihood relied to a great degree on extensive forest use for daily sustainability. Thus, administration of forest use became a highly-contested issue and a central domain in the consolidation of Austrian-Hungarian authority, illustrating how collisions and interplays between the Empire’s transformative vision and its concrete implementation on people and environment materialized. Leading questions in the paper are: How did the administrative structures as implementing bodies of forest regulation evolve over time? What forms of governing bodies and administrative relations to state/private forest lands and their (i)legal users did Austria-Hungary establish? What ecological or/and social obstacles did Austria-Hungary face in the implementation process of its administrative apparatus? How was it dealt with?
The gradual establishment of institutional arrangements in fashioning environmental change are analyzed through the prism of local reports of the Forestry department, which give important insights into the local regulation dynamics of forest use, the setbacks the administration faced over time, like ecological difficulties in terms of accessibility of forests and the reactions of the local population. Thus, the analytical focus lies on administrative apparatuses in forestry, from the perspective of both the imperial rulers’ political ambitions and the local populations agency trying to maintain their livelihoods. For the historical transition from Ottoman to Austro-Hungarian administrative practices, the theoretical concept of path-dependence will be tested. By connecting these two polities the paper emphasizes their interweavement in the field of imperial administration.