Gupta, Priyanshu

Tenurial reforms in forest governance, like the one brought by the enactment of the Forest Rights Act 2006 (FRA) in India, are associated with improvement in forest-based livelihoods for the local communities. But what happens if such tenurial reforms fail to extinguish or aggregate the pre-existing property rights assigned to competing forest resource-uses viz. mining and/or conservation? In this paper, we investigate the nature of institutional change and its implications for reshaping resource-related contestations brought in by FRA 2006.

Using the case study of mineral-endowed and biodiversity-rich Hasdeo Aranya forests in central India, we explicate the effect of fragmentation and creation of multiple overlapping forest rights post-FRA in shaping local communities’ de facto exercise of tenurial rights. We use the conceptual framework of ‘anticommons’ property and a conflict-based analysis of institutional reforms. Our data comprises (i) a detailed review of government and judicial records of policy & legal deliberations, (ii) ethnographic fieldwork over an extended duration, and (iii) interviews with policymakers.

We uncover the effects of pre-existing power asymmetries as they manifest through the institutional regime post de jure tenurial reforms. We find that the very existence of de jure anticommons (created by FRA) can serve as the legal, institutional, and discursive foundation for resistance by local communities against extractivism and displacement. They can also significantly constrain the “Cunning State’s” discretionary powers to mediate conflict amongst stakeholders. Consequently, the power and politics in action could lead to an unstable equilibrium – sometimes leading to a disruption in forest-based livelihoods and, at others, a fulcrum of revival in the forest economy. Our findings represent a radical rethinking of the role of anticommons – traditionally viewed from the lens of inefficiency - in contemporary societies.