Uphill Battle: Forest Rights and Restoration on Podu Landscapes in Keonjhar, Odisha

In response to the global climate emergency and biodiversity loss, environmental advocates promote ecological restoration of millions of hectares of the world’s degraded forest lands. Lands of high value to restoration are home to nearly 300 million people, including 12% of low- and middle-income country populations. In this article, I respond to calls for greater empirical investigation into the social impacts of forest landscape restoration. Through spatial and ethnographic analysis of forest restoration in Keonjhar, Odisha (India), I show that state-led afforestation efforts contradict a decade of forest tenure reform which sought to decentralize and decolonize forest governance. I explore how state-led efforts ignore (and inhibit) the continued protagonism of forest-dwelling communities in forest regeneration on their customary lands. Weaving accounts from 1992 onwards across six villages and 22 plantations, I characterize state strategies as an ‘uphill battle’: by systematically selecting shifting cultivation (podu) uplands for enclosure and tree plantation, forest agencies contribute to a lose-lose situation where neither forest restoration nor forest rights are realized. Investigating this process from colonial forest policy to the present, I leverage a critical political ecology perspective that supports calls for rights-based restoration.

The Judicial Fix for Forest Loss: The Godavarman Case and the Financialization of India’s Forests

In India, the setting up of large projects in forest areas can be undertaken only after government permission is obtained under the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA) of 1980. Today, this approval process includes the enumeration and valuation of forest loss, and the financing of compensatory afforestation schemes to offset the loss. These procedures were designed through the orders and judgements of the Supreme Court of India in a set of cases that started in 1995 and continue to this day. These procedures are purportedly aimed to protect and restore forest ecologies in India. In this article we analyse the Supreme Court’s processes and orders between 1996 and 2006 which transformed the political ecology of forests in India. The judicial and expert discourses treated forest regulation and conservation as a techno-managerial exercise, separating it from social-ecological concerns such as historical dispossession of Adivasis and other forest-dependent people, and violent state suppression of diverse forms of forest management. The judicial interventions are instructive to understand the policy processes of green neoliberalism and the implications of the financialization of forests on environmental governance in India.

Carbon Forests at the Margins of the State: The Politics of Indigenous Sovereignty and Market Environmentalism in the North-eastern Hills of India

In the north-eastern hills of Meghalaya, the Khasi Hills project, self-advertised as ‘one of the first Redd+ initiatives in Asia to be developed and managed by indigenous governments on communal lands’, is often presented as one of the rare success stories of India’s recent experimentation with market instruments as part of its forest governance. This article uses this example to extend existing discussions on the neoliberalization of forest governance, and its intersections with the cultural politics of resource control. Unlike mainstream forestry projects criticized for being too concentrated in the hands of the Forest Department, this project explicitly taps into the particularities of a region located on the margin of the Indian nation-state, where, crucially, ownership and control of the land lie formally with the people rather than with the state. The article explores the politics of this curious marriage of (formal) indigenous sovereignty with market environmentalism, showing, first, the centrality of these assumed cultural and ecological specificities within the regime of justification of such market project; second, how the aspirations of project proponents for community engagement unravelled in practice; and, third, the limits of their endeavours due to larger structural social inequalities and the requirements of such market projects. I conclude with the idea that far from being anecdotal, this case brings interesting perspectives in the context of the struggle for the recognition of forest rights in the rest of India.

Three Ways of Seeing a Forest: On the Social Life of Economization in Indian Carbon Forestry

Irrespective of controversies and frustrated efforts, carbon forestry—the sequestering of greenhouse gases in forests—remains a key element of climate change mitigation. Carbon forestry drives regularly rely on a market-based conservation framework, where forest dwellers are remunerated for their service of maintaining forests through dedicated financial instruments routing global funds. In this article, I turn to India’s first large-scale carbon forestry project, situated in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, and trace how carbon forestry plots are subjected to different temporal trajectories on different levels. I show that the marketing of emission reduction certificates (CER), underpinning carbon forestry, posits emergent forests as permanent sinks. The administrative procedures of this Indian carbon forestry project, however, aim at providing for these forests for sixty years. Finally, I show that villagers perceive a sense of closure, suspending dedicated care and governance routines as the project appears to dismantle and future payments become uncertain. I argue that these different temporal registers not only reveal contradictions within carbon forestry approaches but they also highlight the fragility of attempts to economize forests through supposedly green financial instruments and, therefore, the limited impact of what might appear as neoliberal agendas, in time.

Globalization and the Changing Geography of Social Life in Rural Kerala

This article contributes to the study of globalization and social change in rural Kerala by examining the historical trajectories of educational, occupational and spatial mobility among three communities—Syrian Christians, Ezhavas and Pulayas—in the village of Kavakad, Kerala. It addresses the involvement of each community in transnational migration and related mobilities away from the village. The article is based on quantitative data collected through an intergenerational family survey and semi-structured interviews conducted in Kavakad. The research reveals that while the dominant Syrian Christian community gained most from transnational migration, all three communities benefited from forms of upward mobility. However, our findings also confirm that, despite various forms of mobility, longstanding social inequalities between Syrian Christians, Ezhavas and Pulayas in the village persist. The article highlights the ways in which spatial mobility is a key factor in shaping the relative social mobility of each community. As such, it contributes to our understanding of the reproduction of inequality in contemporary Kerala and, in particular, of the ways in which historically accumulated resources and community networks enabled Syrian Christians to turn transnational migration into lasting forms of upward mobility. It also suggests a need for alternative development interventions at the local level to support the spatial mobility of marginalized rural communities.

Politics of Development in Pakistan: From the Post-Independence Modernization Project to ‘Vision 2025’

This article critically analyses Pakistan’s development project since its independence in 1947 up till Vision 2025 of 2014. Vision 2025 aspires to ‘inclusive growth’ through the expansion of the market as the basis for a ‘people-centric’ approach to development. Based on a critical evaluation of Pakistan’s development trajectory, I argue that a reliance on economic growth via liberal capitalism to address poverty has failed in Pakistan. Post-independence aspirations of decent livelihoods became disrupted by the development project, which evolved through Cold War politics. Premised upon the privileging of liberal capitalism, this modernization project was executed by authoritarian regimes that initiated new processes of dispossession and accentuated existent inequalities. Moreover, a critical analysis of Pakistan’s development crises must consider how poverty intersects with social inequality justified through zat or caste to reproduce entrenched positions of privilege and disadvantage. Mainstream Pakistani society comprises an efficacious trope of inequality normalized through the ‘othering’ of poor families, resistance to which is misrepresented as a lack of character and industry. Impoverished communities bear disproportionate costs of development, which compel them to find shelter in segregated communities in slums and earn a living as servants, vendors and through begging, including children on the streets. In the wake of neo-liberal policy reforms, the Benazir Income Support Programme provides temporary monetary relief to some but leaves intact the underlying causes of worsening inequality. A critical discussion of Pakistan’s development trajectory challenges the ideological premises of Vision 2025 and its promise of universal wellbeing.

Shadow Education in India: Participation and Socioeconomic Determinants

Although shadow education in India has been in practice for a long time, the scale has grown dramatically in recent years, with the size of the industry ranging between $40 and $70 billion. Drawing from the five rounds of National Sample Survey data sets on education, the study examines the trends and socioeconomic determinants of shadow education participation in India. It also addresses the time burden of shadow education and students’ learning outcomes by using the Indian Human Development Survey database. The findings state that households’ socioeconomic status, educational level of households’ head, urban residence, current schooling levels and type of educational institutions by management are highly significant determinants of participation in shadow education. The analysis further indicates that shadow education is positively associated with learning outcomes at the elementary level and that its contribution is larger in mathematics. However, shadow education costs a couple of hours per day of recreational time of the children (time cost), 40–50% share of household’s total educational expenditure, and around 20% share of household’s per capita annual consumption expenditure (economic cost).

Land Acquisition, Markets and Political Networks: Evidence from the Indian Sundarbans

In recent times, land acquisitions in India for both public and private projects are facing stiff political resistance. Existing studies on land acquisition mostly focus on optimal compensation that would secure the consent of land owners. In this article, we argue that besides compensation, membership in different types of networks such as political parties and self-help groups might influence landowner consent. This could occur either because of pro-social concerns or access to better investment opportunities for the compensation amount. Using survey data from flood prone Indian Sundarbans, where the government sought to acquire land to construct embankments, we find evidence supportive of our hypothesis. The survey elicited reservation price response from land owners for a hypothetical land acquisition program. Our estimates show that land owners with self-help group members are more likely to have a higher ask price for agreeing to land sales. In contrast, controlling for length of party association, members of political networks are more likely to sell their land and have a lower reservation price than their non-political counterparts. Our results suggest that, rather than only increasing the compensation package, which is a stock of wealth, it is equally important to enhance the flow of income to ensure consensual land sales.

Book review: Debojyoti Das. 2018. The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India

Debojyoti Das. 2018. The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India. Anthem Press, 252 pages, Price £70 (£18.36 kindle).

Book review: Maria Rashid. 2020. Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army

Maria Rashid. 2020. Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 267 pp., Price $28.00, ISBN: 9781503610415 (Hardback).