Session 9. 1. A.

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.