Contemporary forest management has been constructed from predominantly Global North-driven scientific paradigms and/or driven by external aid. With a techno-managerial focus, it is designed largely around artificial regeneration of few species, mostly timber or fast growing exotics, following a plantation geometry, with high external inputs. Inherited or adopted by the state, they reduce local communities to mere 'recipients’ and ‘labourer’ rather than active stewards those nurture and shape their landscapes. While leading to even-aged, good timber stands and serving industrial wood production goals, this management also resulted in biodiversity loss, dwindling ecosystem services, and alienation of local livelihoods and food security.
In contrast, habitats of indigenous people and local communities, with low to no such management inputs, now show evidences of biodiverse and carbon-rich forests, which is growingly being acknowledged. However, despite this recognition and action to enhance climate finance flow directly towards the IPLCs, community stewarded forest management practices, have not received due attention. Enriched from intrinsic traditional knowledge and adaptive wisdoms, this management system, however, has ensured multiple products and services as well as food and cultural forests, that is critical for climate resilience and sustainable livelihoods.
Unlike, ongoing transformation from high-input, green-revolution agriculture to Nature-based solutions, aligned around agroecological intensification framed around local ecological knowledge, circularity and low external input, forest management continue to remain contemporary, even when community rights are recognised.
In this paper, we argue for recognition and adoption of a Community stewarded management practice, that highlights the value of local ecological knowledge, along with that of agency, and an ethic of care, as imperatives for climate resilient and local economy-reviving forestry. Drawing from our ongoing research in India's forest and tribal overlapping landscapes in Meghalaya, Odisha and Manipur, we demonstrate how locally evolved forest management practices- around regeneration, tending, harvesting and resource management, can consistently lead to diverse, multi-species, multi-layered, multi-aged forests offering a bundle of ecosystem services.
