Forests People and Power

The Political Ecology of Reform in South Asia

Oliver Springate-Baginski,Piers Blaikie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136565328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Sylviculture

With tens of millions of hectares and hundreds of millions of lives in the balance, the debate over who should control South Asias forests is of tremendous political significance. This book provides an insightful
and thorough assessment of important forest management transitions currently underway.
MARK POFFENBERGER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY FORESTRY INTERNATIONAL

The contributions in this volume not only breathe life into the fi eld of writing and analysis related to forests, they do so on the strength of extraordinarily insightful research. Kudos to Springate-Baginski and Blaikie for providing us with a set of thoroughly researched, provocative studies that should be required reading not only for those interested in community forestry in south Asia, but in resource governance anywhere. ARUN AGRAWAL, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF NATURAL RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, USA

Makes a significant contribution to theory and practice of participatory forest management.
YAM MALLA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, REGIONAL COMMUNITY FORESTRY TRAINING CENTER FOR ASIA AND THE PACIFIC, BANGKOK

This excellent and timely book provides thought-provoking insights to the issues of power and politics in forestry and the difficulties of transforming age-old structures that circumscribe the access of the poor to forests and their resources; it challenges our assumptions of the benefits of participatory forest management and the role of forestry in poverty reduction. It should be of interest to policy-makers and to all those who have been involved with the struggle of transforming forestry over the decades.
DR MARY HOBLEY, HOBLEY SHIELDS ASSOCIATES (NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND PLANNING CONSULTANCY)

A rare combination of extensive field study, social science insights and policy studies will be of immense value
DR N. C. SAXENA, MEMBER OF NATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL, GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

In recent decades participatory approaches to forest management have been introduced around the world. This book assesses their implementation in the highly politicized environments of India and Nepal. The authors critically examine the policy, implementation processes and causal factors affecting livelihood impacts. Considering narratives and field practice, with data from over 60 study villages and over 1000 household interviews, the book demonstrates why particular field outcomes have occurred and why policy reform often proves so difficult. Research findings on which the book is based are already influencing policy in India and Nepal, and the research and analysis have great relevance to forestry management in a wide range of countries.

Published with DFID.

Part I

Key Issues and Approaches

In this first part of the book we consider the context of participatory reform in forest management in South Asia, as a preparation for the detailed analysis of the actual regional situations which are presented in Part II. In Chapter 1 we consider the historical background to the emergence of participatory forest management (PFM) in both Nepal and India. We turn our attention to considering the ‘policy process’ and the difficult path of policy reform in Chapter 2. We then, in Chapter 3, look in greater detail at the actors involved in forest management and their structural positions and engagement in the policy process. Lastly, in Chapter 4, we present an analytical approach to considering how local people’s livelihoods are affected by forest management reform.

1

Annexation, Struggle and Response: Forest, People and Power in India and Nepal

Oliver Springate-Baginski, Piers Blaikie, Ajit Banerjee, Binod Bhatta, Om Prakash Dev, V. Ratna Reddy, M. Gopinath Reddy, Sushil Saigal, Kailas Sarap and Madhu Sarin

The issues addressed in this book are not new. Conflict over the control and use of forests and forest lands has been in the political arena for as long as local people and the state have shared an interest in the same resource. We, therefore, need to examine the historical pattern of annexations of forest and land by the state, the struggles of the people in defence of livelihood-related forest access, and policy responses that have led to the emergence of participatory forest management (PFM). These must be understood in terms of long-term historical processes, including, in particular, the emergence of powerful and centralized state forestry agencies.

Over the past 20 years, PFM has, however, led to new paths in forest management – mainstreaming local peoples’ involvement in forest management, especially those who had been increasingly challenged and marginalized by previous forest policies. In India, these date from before the 1878 Forest Act until the present time, and in Nepal, from the Nationalization of Forests in 1956/1957 until the 1970s.

The new direction of PFM emerged during a period of increasing academic attention to the parallel ‘subaltern’ history of local forest management – which has focused on both contestation and conflict against the imposition of colonial forest management (e.g. Guha, 1983, 1989; Gadgil and Guha, 1992, 1995; Chaudhury and Bandopadhyay, 2004). This academic attention was accompanied by grassroots protests and rebellions against commercial forest management by the state – for example, the Chipko and Jharkhand movements and widespread protests in Bastar, which refocused attention once again on issues of the rights of local forest users (GOUP, 1921; Guha, 1989; Saxena, 1995; Munda and Mullick, 2003).

In Nepal, recognition of the customary rights of local hill people to protect the forest and decide on resource use, coupled with innovative lessons from forest handover in Sidhupalchok district in the mid 1970s, laid the foundations of community forestry policy from 1976 to 1993. In 1956/1957, all forests in the country were nationalized with the intention of establishing state control over forest resources. Prior to the return of a constitutional monarchy and the overthrow of the ruling Rana family, forests were under feudal management control (mainly focused on large timber revenues from the valuable tarai forests). However, in the process of nationwide nationalization the Department of Forests (DoF) also acquired control over the forests in the hills. The DoF, at the time, was neither prepared nor equipped to shoulder responsibility for managing all of the country’s forests. As a result, it channelled its efforts into the tarai region (with the most valuable timber) and neglected most of the hill forests altogether. The impact of forest nationalization in the hills was mixed. In some places, the forests were degraded or cleared since the DoF was unable to protect and manage them because nationalization had reduced what had been common property managed by local people to an open-access resource, where trust, rules of use and access to users and exclusion of outsiders were completely undermined. In other places, where people did not experience any difference due to nationalization (since DoF presence was non-existent anyway), the forest was used as before. However, even with strong protection and guarding, the tarai forests became increasingly fragmented and degraded. Malaria eradication, the construction of the East–West Highway, and official and illegal clearing of forest land for resettlement of hill migrants in the 1960s and early 1990s were important factors. Illegal trade in valuable tarai timber within Nepal and with adjoining India through the open border also contributed significantly to widespread felling. Such heavy degradation as a result of incompetent and corrupt forest management lent weight to those who believed that it was almost impossible to manage forests without some kind of people’s participation and local protection of the forest by those who had a stake in it. Whether people’s participation can provide an effective institutional alternative to corrupt and inefficient state-run alternatives remains to be seen, and is discussed in Chapter 5.

The emergence of participatory forest management in India

This section briefly introduces the long history of conflict over forest management in India, from which the recent PFM policies have emerged. The main elements have been well rehearsed in recent literature (Ravindranath and Sudha, 2004; Guha, 1983, 2001; Gadgil and Guha, 1995; Hobley, 1996; Grove et al, 1998; Jeffrey and Sundar, 1999; Ravindanath et al, 2000; Sundar et al, 2001; Edmunds et al, 2003). What concerns us here are the historical origins of the recent efforts to re-orientate forest management towards a more participatory style. At all times, attention is focused on the impacts of forest policy; changes to the rights and obligations of different parties; who gained access to what; who was represented at various levels; and what actually happened. There have been many excellent and invaluable research documents on the emergence of PFM that show that, in different guises, PFM has been an important issue for many years. These accounts usually have a strong agenda for promoting PFM and identify the main actors who have done so. For example, Jeffrey and Sundar (1999) provide an account of the emergence of PFM. It is interesting to note that the discussion of ‘the impact of research and documentation’ (Jeffrey and Sundar, 1999, p34f), as well as of that of donors, lays out their representations and findings; but there is no mention of the response from politicians, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the forest administrations at national and state level. This book acknowledges the obstacles in the path of PFM and goes further than many academic and policy-relevant accounts to ask why they are there, what are the causes of their seeming durability, and what strategies might be followed to improve sustainable livelihoods and forest quality. Table 1.1 provides a timeline of forest management in India since colonial times.

Table 1.1 Evolution of participatory forest management in India

Records of forest management practices are available from as far back as the Mauryan Empire (circa 300 BC), indicating that timber has been a valued and traded commodity for millennia. The Mauryans created reserved forest areas for elephants, maintained by state employees. Emperor Asoka’s edicts mention massive tree plantation activities by the state (Sagreiya, 1994). By the time of the Moghul era, a timber market had penetrated much of the Deccan and northern belt, and accelerated clearance of plains forests for agricultural land to increase state revenue had begun (Singh, 1996).

In pre-colonial feudal periods, forests, pastures and grazing lands close to rural habitation were under common use and management, and were subject to a variety of customary regulatory practices. Further from villages, local rulers set aside specific areas for their own recreational use (e.g. hunting reserves) and also applied varying levels of controls and taxes on the use or trade of forest products. Baden Powell argued that:

There never was a time when the government could not issue an edict reserving certain valuable trees, such as teak, sandal, black wood and other valuable trees, as royal trees, nor any time when the chieftain of the province would have hesitated to enclose a large area of the wasteland as a hunting preserve.

(Baden-Powell, 1892).

The early colonial period was characterized by extensive exploitation and plunder of forests by private contractors, primarily to feed demand for maritime construction timber, although the land revenue objectives of the British Raj were also served by encouraging the conversion of forest land to agricultural use (Gadgil and Guha, 1995, p120). The forests were also felled to meet timber and fuelwood needs for cantonments and urban centres. The advent of railways in India in 1853 led to further large-scale felling to fulfil the need for railway sleepers and, initially, for fuel for steam engines.

This unregulated clear felling of extensive areas led to alarm that strategically important timber supplies were threatened. The India Navy Board stressed the need for timber conservation policies as early as 1830 to save the forests from devastation (Hobley, 1996). This concern gave rise to the formation of the Indian Forest Department for the ‘orderly exploitation’ of India’s forests, and the associated legal and rights structures that continue to this day, most of them diluting, modifying and sometimes totally curtailing the rights of local livelihood-oriented forest users.

The Indian Imperial Forest Service was set up in 1864, headed by Dr Dietrich Brandis, a German forester, as the first Inspector General of Forests from 1864 to 1883 (Guha, 1983). Its functioning required a legal basis from which to assert its authority, which was provided by the hastily drawn up first Forest Act of 1865. This, however, was never fully implemented. A draft revised Forest Act was circulated in 1869 to strengthen the state’s control over forests, and the ensuing debate foreshadowed current PFM policies and practices. The final act established the legal and administrative architecture of the forest bureaucracy, which has largely persisted to the present day. The fundamental issue concerned the customary livelihood-oriented forest use of local people to adjacent forest, and the extent to which their rights should be recognized, commuted or extinguished. The colonial state argued that forest use had been based on the agreement of the raja and therefore was a privilege rather than a right, and since the colonial government was the successor to the rajas, it now had the prerogative to extinguish these privileges where it saw fit (Ribbentrop, 1900, p97). Voices of dissent emerged from officers in the Madras presidency:

The provisions of this Bill infringe the rights of poor people who live by daily labour (cutting wood, catching fish and eggs of birds) and whose feelings cannot be known to those whose opinions will be required on this Bill and who cannot assert their claims, like [the] influential class, who can assert their claims in all ways open to them and spread agitation in the newspapers.

(Venkatachellum Puntulu, cited in Guha 2001, p215)

It is interesting to see how the local revenue officials in the Madras presidency reflected on the relation between communities and forests. Venkatachellum Puntulu, the deputy collector of Bellary district, further argued that:

… it is known fact that all the jungles in this part of country are the common property of the people and that the poor persons who live near them enjoy their produce from immemorial time.

(Board of Revenue Proceedings, Madras, 1871, cited in Guha, 2001).

Dietrich Brandis was also strongly opposed to the ‘annexationist’ approach and consistently urged finding a middle way between systematic forest management in extensive valuable tracts and accommodating the needs of local people. This could be achieved, he suggested, by creating a local administrative structure for the facilitation of village forest management, eventually leading to the village assuming management responsibility:

Not only will …[communal] forests yield a permanent supply of wood and fodder to the people without any material expense to the State, but if well managed, they will contribute much towards the healthy development of municipal institutions and local self government.

(Brandis, 1884)

Despite these appeals, the ‘annexationist’ position advocated by Baden-Powell prevailed, and the resultant Indian Forest Act of 1878 led to the expansion of commercial exploitation of the forest and the inevitable removal of important livelihood materials from forest-adjacent peoples (Poffenberger and McGean, 1996, p59). It introduced a system of categorizing forests into three classes. State or ‘reserved’ forests were set aside where forests were of commercial value. Customary rights here were ‘settled’, meaning that they were generally converted to ‘privileges’ to be exercised elsewhere or totally extinguished. The second class of forest was ‘protected’, wherein rights and privileges were recorded, but not settled, although all valuable tree species were even here reserved by the government, and ‘damaging’ practices such as grazing could be restricted (Rangarajan, 1996). The Forest Act also provided for ‘village forests’, but since their formation first required their reservation by the forest department, local people became suspicious and this provision was hardly implemented. The van panchayats (VPs), the so-called forest v...