Session 9. 8. B.

As studies have shown, natural resources and livelihoods sustained by the commons are under assault around the world by multinational firms acting conjointly with host-national governments. In some cases, international agencies are also complicit; although troubling, their failure to protect the commons is unsurprising—given the lack of international norms focused on protecting the commons.
We draw on a village impact study from Sierra Leone, where the World Bank (WB), joined by the African Development Bank and others, sponsored a hydroelectric project that dispossessed subsistence farmers of common lands jointly held by kin-groups and farmed individually by households, using a rotational bush-fallow system adapted to the local environment. By diminishing their holdings, the project significantly reduced the capacity of user communities to avoid the commons dilemma of resource depletion—shortening fallow periods, degrading soils and sharply increasing labor for weeding—all without adequate compensation for recurrent losses, nor due consideration in project design. At the same time, however, the WB and its partners took great care to follow international norms protecting biodiversity.
The primary source of international neglect, we argue, is epistemic, a consequence of how the commons has ordinarily been defined and represented in both scholarly and public discourse—in terms of the weakness of exclusion rather the tenure rights of users. If principles of inclusion, such as tenure rights, are understood as constitutive of the commons, then external vulnerability is a universal commons attribute; for tenure necessarily depends on external recognition, exposing users to local and global asymmetries of power. When national governments fail to recognize the tenure rights of commons users, international agencies can provide a critical source of leverage—if supported by recognized international norms. Articulating those norms is important, unfinished work collectively for commons scholars, in particular, the IASC.

In this presentation, we would highlight ways in which a ‘situated political ecology’ approach can capture livelihoods and co-creation of forest enclosed ecological commons in the three Protected Areas of Buxa Tiger Reserve, Jaldapara National Park and Gorumara National Park, in the state of West Bengal, India. Using a qualitative and ethnographic approach, we show that established systems of resource control have translated Duars, the Eastern Sub-Himalayan savannah grassland, into a politico-ecological entity of colonial extractive capitalism. Neoliberal conservation as espoused by the state forest governance have incorporated global priorities into the local forest economies, for subsuming the protected forests into a world capitalist production system. Commercialization of Duars not only led to a space for extraction of resources, but consequently have dispossessed communities of their erstwhile rights. Neoliberal conservation mechanisms are transforming forest-dependent communities towards market-based livelihoods.

This study is an ethnographic account of the forest villages of the Protected Areas of Duars i.e. Buxa Tiger Reserve, Jaldapara National Park and Gorumara National Park, where the forest-dependent communities’ dependency on commons is critical for their livelihood, survival and subsistence. These communities have a strong sense of belonging with their commons, which stands as a criticality of commons due to contested access to resources. Customarily the symbiotic relation of the forest-dependent communities to the forest’s systems have been rooted in their socio-natural practices while being dependent on their forest common resources. Forest-dependent communities predominantly depend upon common lands for open cattle grazing, as they either have small agricultural land, or are landless. Livestock raising, subsistence cultivation are critical economic form of livelihood as access to forest resources have been restricted. This ethnographic study using situated political ecology approach will contribute towards how situated living practices of struggle and resilience around livelihood opportunities are being produced through forest conservation institutions. We will further argue how co-creation of livelihood resilience for the communities along with provisions for the preservation of local ecological knowledge in these volatile geographies are necessary.

Large swathes of land have undergone increased land-use change for conservation and development-oriented projects, where the communities being displaced and dispossessed were historically categorized as ‘marginal’, their livelihood practices considered ‘unproductive’, and their lands termed as ‘waste’. In contemporary India, this expansion over land was followed by a process of establishing legitimacy through new sets of legislations and land technologies over previous property regimes that came under the control of the state and private actors, especially in the rural landscape. Drawing from the fieldwork done around a mining-adjacent village in borderland India, this research examines the political economy of adaptation practices in nomadic pastoral communities in the arid regions of Kutch, Gujarat. Using mixed methods, I show how changes such as sedentarization, non-farm livelihoods, changes in herd composition and forward market linkages have emerged in the village structure in an attempt to (re)orient or (re)negotiate their access to shrinking pastures. As they continue to resist and adapt to changes in their socio-political environment, households have shifted from being nomadic camel herders towards mining-industrial sector leading to significant change in both their livelihoods and identity. Through accounts from the everyday lives of Rabari herders, I explore these new patterns adopted by them to creatively (re)interpret external interventions. Moreover, this research offers perspectives from political geography and critical agrarian studies, to understand these new sites of transition post-dispossession of commons and the politics around it by complicating the image of pastoralists as being marginal, mobile and inherently vulnerable to change.

This paper presents among the first comparative empirical studies on the implementation of "life plans" in the Amazon region. Life plans are tools aimed at advancing Indigenous empowerment, conservation efforts, and rural development objectives. Rooted in the transformative planning traditions originating in the 1970s, Indigenous organizations and conservation non-profits have championed life plans as alternatives to conventional development strategies that can promote ecosystem health and human well-being rather than narrowly emphasizing incomes and economic growth. Focusing on the Peruvian Amazon, this study explores how life plans have worked in practice. Despite the substantial impact of these plans on the globally significant ecosystems of the region, their effects have not been subjected to rigorous study until now. Drawing on data from 120 semi-structured interviews and 285 focus group participants across twelve Indigenous communities spanning four diverse watersheds, this paper investigates the extent to which life plans have facilitated transformative changes. We show that connections to broader social movements are vital in ensuring that life plans do not inadvertently reinforce existing political and economic structures. The study reveals that while life plans have enhanced collaborative conservation efforts in pre-established co-management structures, they have not fundamentally transformed historically strained relationships between communities and environmental agencies. Moreover, our results indicate that communities struggle to leverage state resources through life plans without robust advocacy institutions. Despite not directly altering rural power dynamics, life plans have, in certain instances, enabled communities to articulate visions of a future that are less extractive and more ecologically sustainable. We urge international climate justice movements, political ecologists including degrowth scholars, and planners to study and critically support life plans and Indigenous institutions advocating for them.