Choudhury, Pranab Ranjan

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.

In this paper, we explore the role of psychological ownership in the evolution of community stewardship. Community stewardship is defined as individuals or self-organized groups steering the management of a shared common-pool resource (CPR) by making local stakeholders care for them through a democratic process (FES, 2024). We use the model of stewardship antecedents developed by Hernandez (2012) to demonstrate how stewardship behavior is independent of property rights and ownership. While ownership plays an important role in defining the relationship of users with their ecosystem, the individuality or legality of ownership is different from the psychology of ownership or the ‘feeling’ that it is ‘my property, even if I don’t own it legally or individually’ (Pierce et al 2001; Peck et al, 2020). This feeling of ownership is rooted in an innate need to possess, where a property becomes an extension of one’s self. To elaborate, we study how stewardship emerges in the members of the Bishnoi community found primarily in North-Western arid regions of India, for two of their most valued community resources, the Khejri trees (Prosopis cineraria) and the Blackbuck antelope (Antilope cervicapra). This community is considered, in general parlance, as the first environmentalists of India and their presence has been positively associated with an abundance of biodiversity (Hall, 2011). A survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews helps us identify the key attributes of psychological ownership and its mediators. We conclude with laying down the design principles of stewardship behavior, that is, conditions under which mediators such as – effectance (deriving satisfaction out of control), self-identity, sense of place, care, knowledge, intimate association and felt responsibility – align with stewardship. By admitting to the role of psychological ownership and theorizing upon stewardship behavior, we can better understand those instances of self-governance that exist prior to community crafted institutions.