The state plays an indispensable role in policy-making to govern the commons, collective action, and formal and informal institutions in postcolonial societies. To overcome socio-ecological crises, the state uses public policy as a tool to manage and govern the commons, thereby often limiting citizens’ capacity to access these commons.
In the analysis of interactions between state, citizens, and non-state actors in policy processes, the role of power is emerging as an important factor in understanding these complex set-ups. Explicit considerations of power may reveal underlying colonial continuities, entrenched power asymmetries, and persisting inequalities that cut across social, economic, and political arenas and affect the decision-making processes and institutions under investigation. However, emerging approaches to conceptualising power are yet to find broad application in policy and institutional anlyses.
In this panel, we invite contributions that draw on postcolonial, decolonial, and subaltern theorizations or framings to integrate critical reflections on power in their public policy analysis of commons governance.
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.
The paper intends to explore how forest rights policy processes contributed to the commoning of non-timber forest products in the case of tendu leaves in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, India. It examines everyday practices and social relations among the forest dwellers in collecting tendu leaves that enable them to come together, share, and act collectively. This commoning process is the result of the post-forest rights policy processes. These policy processes have initiated the commoning process in every block of Gadchiroli, which led to the formation of gram sabha federations in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. The existing literature on the commoning of commons provides insights into the institutional designs, but less is explained about the process of commoning. The paper seeks to fill this gap by examining how post-forest rights policy processes have enabled social practices and relational arrangements to initiate the commoning of tendu leaves in the Kurkheda block of Gadchiroli district. These policy processes have enabled the collective to explore innovative subsystems of networks to mitigate uncertainties. The paper is based on a longitudinal study conducted in Gadchiroli from December 2019 to June 2024. It provides a multi-sited ethnography of collective actions and social practices connected to the commoning process of tendu leaves. The research findings reveal that gram sabha federation has pushed forest-dwelling communities towards sustainable livelihood practices and social relations rooted in collective empowerment and democratic decision-making.
Almost two decades have passed since the rights-based turn in forest governance, mitigating historical injustice towards forest dwellers, through the promulgation of FRA in India. Thousands of villages have received community forest rights (CFRs) till now. But, the ground realities of policy implementation still evade the development of decentralized forest governance – a promise of the much-celebrated Forest Rights Act. What is seen instead is a slow, skewed rights recognition based on negotiations between multiple actors with differential abilities to influence outcomes. Successes in one pocket or state do not find rapid adoption in others, nor are the successes always sustained. For example, in Maharashtra, progressive policy reforms decentralized the sale of non-timber forest produce through community-led institutions that were initially supported by the provision of working capital. This support was soon withdrawn in subsequent years, weakening the impact of decentralized NTFP trade. In Chhattisgarh, the recognition of CFRs was overdue for several years. A political push led to the vigorous distribution of forest rights titles to villages since 2019. Yet, a closer analysis of village-level data found that there were numerous cases with under-recognition of CFR areas. What leads to such erratic processes and outcomes? Drawing on policy implementation cases from the states of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, in this paper we analyse the persistence of power asymmetries notwithstanding the push for institutional reform in state agencies while operationalizing rights-based forest governance. We show that the outcomes in terms of giving power to community-based institutions result from the Forest Department’s colonial history and power over institutions of forest conservation, the post-colonial social welfarism-oriented framing of the Tribal Department and administrative agencies couched in contestations of caste and class, and the unsteady support of political groups to the demographically marginal forest-dwelling communities.
This paper examines power differentials among diverse, overlapping institutions across different scales and levels in collective decision-making forums for Indigenous peoples (IPs) tenure governance in India's forests. Drawing on Carlisle and Gruby's (2019) polycentric governance framework and Morrison et al.'s (2019) polycentric power typology, I analyze how three dimensions of power—design power, pragmatic power, and framing power—influence polycentric institutional arrangements and interactions affecting IPs tenure (in)security in India's forest commons. Through a qualitative case study of India's Indigenous Rajwar or Van Raji peoples in the Kumaon Himalayas, I demonstrate that while India's Forest Rights Act 2006 envisions a polycentric governance structure, its implementation falls short of its aims. This is because dominant state actors maintain their historical influence through three key mechanisms: weakened design of authority and power, networked patronage, and the perpetuation of incapacity frames (both of self and others). These mechanisms effectively undermine—or 'governmentalize'—the role of IPs, democratic institutions, and local state and non-state actors in decision-making processes. Based on these findings, I argue that dominant state institutions advance their reactionary and rent-seeking strategies through micro and macro political dynamics and respective political-economic priorities that are misaligned with and often conflict with IPs tenure security.
Nature conservation has been an integral part of Indian society since time immemorial. The notion of ‘sacred’ has been used to express the utmost importance of the natural resources. For instance, there are sacred plants that cannot be harmed, sacred animals that cannot be poached and sacred rivers that must not be polluted. Similarly, there are Sacred Groves spread all over India (and globally) that are preserved and protected by the indigenous communities through their unique socio-cultural practices that run across generations. They are the sites of communal stewardship showing pathways of sustainable futures and respect for the natural world.
Sacred Groves are known by different names in India. In Rajasthan, they are called Orans. Being an arid state, Orans are the green oasis in this desert state. The indigenous communities of Rajasthan play a key role in maintaining and conserving these Sacred Groves. These communities are dependent on the Groves culturally, socially and economically as well. They collect grass, dry wood and wild berries from the Orans and even take their cattle to graze on these sites. This qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic study highlights the cultural practices embedded in the everyday lives of tribal communities in Rajasthan to show how the culture of the tribals is intricately linked to nature conservation hence making them the experts of climate resilience.
This paper also discusses the process of ‘Institutional Bricolage’ in the domain of natural resource governance and how this approach can help in better understanding the hybrid dialogue between the formal institutions of ecological conservation and informal elements of people’s agency, situatedness and power relations within the community. In conclusion, this paper argues that identifying and acknowledging the different socio-cultural beliefs and practices of the local communities, alongside formal rules and regulations, is crucial for managing and conserving Sacred Groves of India and beyond.
The recent scholarship on commons argues that every common should have clearly defined boundaries and institutional arrangements to regulate the rights of the beneficiaries. Determining boundaries for commons includes terms like ‘demarcation’ or ‘enclosures’, which have multiple meanings and applications, particularly in forestland. The history of colonial forestland in India speaks about the demarcation of hectares of forests as reserved or protected forests, primarily achieved by expelling all the forest-dependent communities without any settlement of customary rights. With the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, the Indian Government introduced the provision of recording Community Forest Resources (CFR) to address the ‘historical injustice’ faced by the Scheduled Tribes and other forest-dwelling communities since the colonial demarcation of forests and the subsequent control by the Forest Department. However, the process of demarcating the boundaries of CFR under FRA (2006) has faced multiple contestations among different stakeholders like the Forest Department, the Gram Sabhas (village councils formed under FRA 2006), the Forest Protection Committees and the people who have accessed the forests without any institutional acknowledgement. Based on ethnographic studies undertaken in phases in the Ajodhya Pahar Hill Range of Eastern India, the current paper has tried to show how the process of demarcating the forest commons has been severely contested between several institutions and groups, despite the state itself mandating the regulation and demarcation of CFR by the concerned Gram Sabhas formed under FRA (2006).
Landscapes hold memories, they tell stories of place and people through their spatial histories
and relational geographies. Salt pan lands of the once colonial city of Bombay, now Mumbai,
trace the violence of colonization and the voice of India’s freedom struggle through the salt
satyagraha. Ironically, these very memoryscapes that epitomize the representation of India’s
freedom, continue to remain postcolonial spaces of oppression, warranting the question -
freedom for whom? In this article, I make visible the ‘unfreedom’ of three communities interacting with Mumbai’s salt pans - the kolis, agaris, and adivasis while drawing on Amartya Sen’s provocations of ‘unfreedom’ - poverty and tyranny. This research analyzes interviews, archival and court documents to critique the colonial epistemologies that fix land and fragment resources on these fluid ecologies. Mumbai’s salt pan lands offer a charged site to study the caste, class dynamics of the tiller and landlord that continue untouched post-independence as colonial categorization of these lands under the ambit of ‘industry’ omit them from land reforms. The article concludes that the nexus of the State, developers and judiciary, continues to perpetuate these epistemologies with strategic change in land-use policy and probes a re-imaging of freedom in a planning process inspired by Amartya Sen’s 'Development as Freedom. '
In recent decades, the rapid loss of biodiversity has become a global concern. A significant portion of the world’s biodiversity, concentrated in the Global South, is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic pressures such as land use change, degradation, urbanization, overexploitation, pollution, and climate change. These pressures are further exacerbated by weak governance, political instability, unrestricted economic growth, and fluctuations in international commodity markets. Additionally, countries in the Global South grapple with the legacies of colonialism, power imbalances in resource ownership, and the extraction of natural and land resources.
The establishment of protected areas (PAs) has been a fundamental aspect of conservation efforts, beginning with Yosemite National Park in 1864 in the USA. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines protected areas as “clearly defined geographical spaces, recognized, dedicated, and managed through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature along with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.” Many of these biologically diverse ecosystems are inhabited by traditional and indigenous communities.
In this research, I introduce the key concerns regarding reduced access to natural resources due to conservation projects in India, particularly as faced by tribal groups and women living within the Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal. I aim to employ the frameworks of environmental justice, intersectionality, and political ecology to address the justice concerns associated with protected areas in India. Conservation efforts undertaken by several countries have often resulted in extensive displacement and relocation, adversely impacting local tribal populations. However, these actions have been justified on the grounds of biodiversity conservation and are largely omitted from the dispossession literature (Lasgorceix et al., 2009).
While there is scholarship addressing land dispossession in India, there exists a gap in the literature concerning the gendered impacts of such displacement, particularly in the context of reserve forests. Specifically, there is a lack of comparative analyses regarding the welfare consequences and overall sustainability of these conservation projects. An overview of the scholarly literature indicates that conservation and eco-development initiatives have further marginalized already disadvantaged populations in the name of ‘development.’
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