Patriarchies in the Forests in India: Communities in Peril (original) (raw)
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Unpacking ‘gender’ in joint forest management: Lessons from two Indian states
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Gender inequalities and social exclusions in community-based forest management have garnered attention, particularly in South Asia. Yet, framings that homogenize women and marginalized groups fail to capture the nuanced processes by which such exclusions occur. Despite provisions for women in local community management institutions, numerous constraints hinder their active participation in forest governance. Understanding participation in JFM requires attention not only to gender, but also to the diversified interests and experiences women hold and the unequal power relations in which they are enmeshed. Based on 85 semi-structured interviews with women and men farmers, JFM committee members, local authorities, NGO staff and Forest Department officials, we explore emic perspectives of how social differentiation shapes participation in JFM. We compare the situation in Karnataka, a wealthier Indian state that is considered exemplary for JFM, with that in Madhya Pradesh, a poorer Indian state inhabited by tribal populations, where JFM is poorly functional. We show that exclusions in Uttara Kannada occur along gender and caste lines, whereas among tribal groups in Mandla, women of certain ethnicities are particularly disadvantaged in JFM despite their extensive forest use. Grouping marginalized groups into homogeneous categories (e.g. as Scheduled Tribes or Scheduled Castes), as do Indian laws addressing tribal issues, deters focus from the inequalities that occur among groups, and from their relevance in shaping local experiences. Place-based environmental and political economic histories further shape local interests and participation in JFM. We argue that a focus on gender is necessary but not sufficient to understand social exclusions in JFM, and that gender must be understood in relation to other factors of social differentiation.
Women and Forest: Changing Gender Relations Among the Kondhs in Odisha
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The identity, knowledge systems, production practices and consumption pattern of Kondhs link them with their ecological realities. Their economy is underpinned with the ethos of communitarianism and reciprocity. However, this community is experiencing changes in its way of life due to different external interventions such as market-based 'mainstream development', stringent forest policies and unsecured land rights. These changes have particularly affected the rights and status of Kondh women, considering their high dependence on forest for food, fodder, and livelihood. This study not only focuses on the changes but also emphasizes the strategies utilized by Kondh women to deal with the changing consequences. It tries to understand if the state forest policies, as claimed, have been able to secure access and rights of the forest to the Adivasi women. It is qualitative in nature and uses an interview method to grasp the experiences of Kondh women in Rayagada district of Odisha. It concludes that forest policies often neglected women's worldviews, excluding them from making decisions regarding forest management and governance. It highlights the fact that securing community land rights to women is the most sustainable way to safeguard forest biodiversity.
Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of peacebuilding, 2023
The role of women has often been ignored in the scholarship on environmental history which has focused on issues like customary rights over forests, land, or waterbodies and community led resistance to protect these rights from encroachment and appropriation by the state and the market. In a discussion on the power dynamics between an all-powerful state and the marginalised communities engaging in a struggle over forest rights or land rights, the women are often made invisible, as even the community starts to consider the focus on women's issues like inheritance or mandatory reservation for women in the Panchayats as divisive for the community and the movement. This paper tries to understand the agency of women in the politics of forestland. Based on an ethnographic study in the Ajodhya Pahar region of Purulia, West Bengal, the paper argues that women are most often conscious political actors in forestland politics and not simply 'victims' of male domination and manipulation. The paper attempts to explore the multiple strategies used by the women to negotiate a space within the larger community politics demanding the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 in the region.
The paper highlights a crisis of the forest community in contemporary India and its incompatibility for the realization of democratic forest governance, even after the passage of the Forest Rights Act 2006. A discourse analysis of the forestry sector brings forth the permeation of the broader politics in shaping the forest community in the policy and law documents. The article argues that a mere recognition of rights of the forest community does not subvert the colonial legacy of the state-forest community relationship. In fact, the state sees the forest community as static i.e. apolitical and non-changing to maintain its control over the forests, which is evident through a content analysis of the forest policies and laws in India. This results in a myopic view of the forest community and fails to factor in the changing and contested nature of it, further reducing recognition as a one-time effort and not a process.
Neoliberal development policies premised on resource diversion for commercial exploitation have accelerated economic growth in India, while alienating forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes from their resource base and livelihood options. For women, the ensuing displacement, impoverishment and transformation of cultural ethos has translated to a loss in status, reduced income and independent access to resources. In order to arrest the growing inequality particularly in the conditions of tribal women, this paper posits that development should be oriented towards the equitable distribution of land and forest resources to Scheduled Tribes and marginalized constituencies within them. Existing interventions approach rights to natural resources from three directions: to strengthen due process guarantees in land acquisition, to grant formal recognition to tribal customary rights over forests, and to equalize women’s individual resource ownership. These interventions either neglect or actively contribute to impoverishment and underdevelopment for women in tribal communities by failing to account for the multiple avenues of marginalization and emancipation in their struggle for control over resources: the state, market and community. To meet a transformative distributive agenda, I preliminarily frame a three-pronged intervention in this paper, in material distribution of resources, political empowerment and cultural change. This marks the first step in a deeper empirical analysis of formal, semi-formal and informal legal rules in distributing rights and access to resources to particularly marginalized constituencies within Scheduled Tribes, in order to alter the course of the prevailing development paradigm.
Conservation and Society, 2021
This article explores the multiple processes of maintaining access and asserting user rights to forest space among the Van Gujjar pastoralists in North India. In particular, the Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) has created an opportunity for forest dwellers across India to seek legal means to forest rights. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork, organising workshops on forest rights, and mapping traditional territories among the Van Gujjars, we observed that complex cultural performances are necessary for the Van Gujjars to claim access to forest areas and resources—legal or otherwise. These performances include, but are not limited to, litigation, supporting emergent leaders, and caring for cattle and kin under constant threats of evictions. Drawing on recent scholarship on the everyday formation of territorial governments, we examine how communities maintain, contest, or reinvent cultural practices and governance in the context of their struggles for access inscribed as forest rights. In contrasting cases among two groups of Van Gujjars seeking rights to forest spaces in the two neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, we shed light on the repercussions that formally or informally engaging the FRA can have for communities of forest dwellers. Based on ethnographic research completed between 2012 and 2019, we find that 1) the Van Gujjar territorial governments carrying on these claims are more diverse than the law recognises, and that 2) not all communities see it worthy to organise a territorial government claiming formal rights under the FRA. Fundamentally, we discern that more immediate threats to Van Gujjar livelihoods result in a greater shift in their cultural practices towards organising a territorial government seeking forest rights through the FRA.
Optimizing Women’s assertion of Forest Rights: An Initiative from Odisha
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Women play a critical role in the conservation and management of forest resources simultaneously deriving their livelihood from the forest. In the context of India, Agarwal (1994) mentioned that women’s rights under forest tenure reform are not given priority and which resulted in discrimination within the family due to inheritance laws and alienation of rights and control over property. Further an extensive study undertaken by Bose (2011) among the Bhil community of Rajasthan revealed that the Bhil women have low level of on ground participation vis-a-vis control over, formulation of rules relating to the forest management and its commercial exploitation despite them having the maximum work relating to conservation and management of the forest.