Mishra, Janmejaya

India’s Forest Rights Act intends to recognize management rights on traditional forest resources. How states are intervening to facilitate management of recognized Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights has remained under-researched. We study India’s two relatively successful states in recognizing CFR rights – Maharashtra and Odisha. We explore how these states have intervened to enable post-recognition forest management activities. We construct a longitudinal case study of official documents issued by these states. We analyze these documents using thematic analysis. Covering 2012 till 2024, Maharashtra has issued 44 government resolutions, whereas, Odisha has only prepared a draft protocol for facilitating management plans post-recognition of CFR.
Our analysis shows that Maharashtra has tried to enable the constitution of village-level CFR Management Committees and the preparation of Conservation and Management Plans (CMP). Its strategies varied from financing non-government organizations to assist villages in preparing CMP to focus directly on the villages. Further, for monitoring the implementation of those CMP, strategies varied in how they intended to constitute village, block, and district-level institutional structures led by government actors. During this period, financing additional manpower in selected blocks and districts was consistently maintained.
On the other hand, analysis of the draft protocol shows that Odisha has designed and implemented an innovative state-sponsored scheme, namely the Mo Jungle Jami Yojana (MJJY), since August 2023, to expedite facilitating post-CFR management, among other interventions. The MJJY creates block and state-level institutions. Moreover, it has also created an enabling policy environment for proactively engaging with credible civil society organizations to facilitate the CFR management processes at the district level. It currently plans to strategically build capacities of concerned stakeholders, including the local communities, to develop and implement CFR Management Plans in selected villages on a pilot basis.
Our analysis shows that even when the Forest Rights Act does not mandate any such action to enable local communities to facilitate commoning in the post-CFR recognition phase, the states can initiate enabling strategies, though following different mechanisms. These results indicate policy learning among state-level government actors on enabling commoning, implying that commoning is likely to take shape slowly out of strategic trials and errors at the state level.