S, Krithi

Within the existing scholarly work on commons and commoning, there has been limited engagement with the challenges posed by the rise of neoliberal governance models. Focusing on forests as commons, this study departs from the dominant analytical framework that poses community resource management in opposition to the logic of the State or capitalist market. There is a need to study the commons as influenced by the expansion of government-controlled forest areas, government-recognized common property areas along with the expansion of private property rights under neoliberalism. In India, the Forest Rights Act 2006 grants tenure rights to communities, giving them greater control over forest resources. Our research is based on one such site in Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh, wherein 28 revenue villages secured community forest rights in 2020 through the Forest Rights Act 2006. Through findings based on in-depth interviews and group discussions, our paper addresses two questions: one, how has the process of securing tenure rights changed the management of land use and community rights over the extraction and sale of forest produce? And two, how has community ownership altered social relations within the community, and what are its social justice implications? We find that despite the legal acknowledgement of rights, the collective struggles to define itself and the village community and sustain forest-based livelihoods. While there was substantial local participation in the movement to achieve community rights, the momentum has waned after the legal recognition. The federation formed in the process is struggling to expand its functioning while the powerful state department and erstwhile market traders continue with their earlier roles. Our paper opens the discussion on the transformative potential of community rights obtained under the Forest Rights Act 2006, a process underway across India.

Ecological restoration has emerged as one of the key global mechanisms for nations to mitigate climate change and achieve their net zero emission targets. But there is no common agreement on what would constitute restoration, which has led to a broad national policy directive of planting more trees, particularly in the Global South. Multiple studies in recent times have pointed out the consequent failure of restoration projects, and an urgent need for further research on how existing institutions and tenure systems influence success of restoration programmes. Post-colonial countries like India are characterised by state-controlled forest regions with concurrent multiple forms of tenure systems. Our paper explores how the broad objective of forest restoration has been interpreted and translated into practise in the specific context of the Western Ghats in the state of Karnataka in Southern India. We study how restoration objectives, processes and decision making varies across state, common and private property in forest land. We use secondary data, forest department records, and interviews with forest officials and village representatives to study changes in tree planting practices of the state forest department in the district of Uttara Kanada. We supplement this with primary data from a 900-household survey across two forested blocks of the Uttara Kanada district to analyse household choices on tree planting and how people of different sections respond to restoration priorities. Our findings indicate key conflicts around the choice of plant species to be planted and institutions through which the planting is to be carried out. We argue that restoration practises advocated by changing external pressures and priorities of the Indian state have resulted in exclusion of the marginalised sections and a very narrow realisation of environmental goals. It is necessary to reframe restoration policy in region specific contexts, addressed to existing land relations, the nature of the commons and the priorities of the local communities.