Competing Visions: Domestic Forests, Politics and Forest Policy in the Central Western Ghats of South India

Abstract

International audienceRural people in developing countries including India continue to access a number of types of 'forests' to meet specific needs such as fuelwood, fodder, food, non-timber forest produce and timber for both subsistence and income generation. While a plethora of terms exist to describe the types of forests that rural people use—such as farm forests, social forests, community forests and small-scale for-ests—the expression domestic forest has recently been proposed. Domestic forest is a term aimed at capturing the diversity of forests transformed and managed by rural communities and a way to introduce a new scientific domain that recognises that production and conservation can be reconciled and that local communities can be effective managers. This paper argues in the context of the central Western Ghats of south India that while the domestic forest concept is a useful umbrella term to capture the diversity of forests used by rural people, these domestic forests are often not autonomous local forests but sites of contestation between local actors and the state forest bureaucracy. Hence, a paradigm shift within the forest bureaucracy will only occur if the scientific forestry community questions its own normative views on forest management and sees forest policy as a means to recognise local claims and support existing practices of forest dependent communities

Local Community Attitudes toward Forests Outside Protected Areas in India. Impact of Legal Awareness, Trust, and Participation.

“…The district has extensive state controlled forests surrounding a complex mosaic of multistoreyed, coffee-based agroforests and rice paddies ( Fig. 1; Garcia et al 2009). …”

Public Policies and Management of Rural Forests: Lasting Alliance or Fool's Dialogue?

“…Rural forest and sustainable development policies: towards a political ecology As noted by Menon et al (2009), "rural forests are often not autonomous local forests but the product of a complex relationship between the state and local actors mediated by public policies. And they often appear as sites of contestation between local actors and forest bureaucracies."…”

“…Rural forests are thus requalified through naturalist or environmental narratives that justify new development projects. Naturalization may reflect the reinforcement of sector-based logics like the community forests in Cameroon (Lescuyer 2005) or rural forests in India (Menon et al 2009). It can come along with the "greening process" of agriculture, which tends to favor environmental services at large scales rather than production at local scales like in rehabilitation of chestnut forests in France (Michon 2011).…”

“…In France, until recently, when farmers wanted to incorporate trees in their fields, they could not claim national subsidies; chestnut managers could not be registered as farmers (Michon 2011); the role of Mediterranean bush for grazing is still denied and farmers have to hold grass fields to be registered as farmers. The Indian and Indonesian laws still differentiate between "forest trees" and "agricultural trees", the former belonging to the State even if they grow on farmers' fields (Menon et al 2009). …”

“…Farmers were so harassed that they preferred to uproot sandalwood seedlings from their fields (Michon 2005). In the Western Ghats of India, farmers have, over time, replaced the "forest trees" that shade the coffee plantations on their farms, with fruit trees and fast growing species (Menon et al 2009), resulting in a significant decrease in forest biodiversity in the region. At worst, this segregation means that farmers are deprived of much of their land resource base (Fay and Michon 2005).…”