Browsing by Author "Lele, Sharachchandra"

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Critiquing the Commons: Missing the Woods for the Trees?
(2003) Menon, Ajit; Lele, Sharachchandra
"Generally speaking, scholars of the commons have been concerned with understanding what makes institutions for the management of common-pool resources emerge and function successfully. In a recent contribution to World Development, Arun Agrawal begins by choosing institutional durability as a proxy for success and then makes essentially two points. First, he feels that we are some distance away from a comprehensive theory of what makes commons institutions durable. This is because we have paid little attention to how the large number of causal factors identified so far are linked to each other and also to key contextual factors such as demography, markets, state policies and resource characteristics. Second, he argues that the literature is clogged with case studies, whereas what is actually needed is comparisons across purposively chosen case studies and statistical analyses using large-N studies."
'Defining' Moment for Forests?
(2007) Lele, Sharachchandra
"The recent attempt by the ministry of environment and forests to arrive at a definition of forests has opened a Pandora's box with all stakeholders analysing the semantics threadbare. A deep appreciation of the complexities of the issues is required by all concerned to enable more locally specific, democratic and balanced structures of forest governance."
Draft NEP 2004: A Flawed Vision
(2005) Lele, Sharachchandra; Menon, Ajit
"The draft National Environment Policy released by the Ministry of Environment and Forests of the Government of India represents the first-ever attempt to draft a policy for the environment as a whole. The document endorses a broad set of concerns, including intra-generational and inter-generational equity, identifies the major environmental problems that India faces, and outlines their proximate and ultimate causes. In addressing these problems, it proposes to follow several principles such as the precautionary principle, polluter pays, incomparable values, public trust, decentralisation, and integration. It then tries to outline specific strategies and actions that should be given priority in each sector. We argue, however, that the draft is fundamentally flawed in its vision and its analysis of socio-environmental problems. Consequently, instead of mainstreaming environmental concerns into all development activities and sectors (its stated goal), it mainstreams the current notion of unbridled development into even the limited environmental regulation in the country."
The Economic Impact of Forest Hydrological Services on Local Communities: A Case Study from the Western Ghats of India
(2008) Lele, Sharachchandra; Patil, Iswar; Badiger, Shrinivas; Menon, Ajit; Kumar, Rajeev
"The conventional wisdom that more forest is always better has dominated policy making in the management of forested watersheds. In the context of the supposed hydrological regulation service provided by forest ecosystems, however, hydrologists have debated this assumption for more than two decades. Unfortunately, detailed studies of the relationship between forest cover, hydrology and the economic use of water have been relatively scarce, especially in the tropical forests of South Asia. Building upon a larger research project at four sites in the Western Ghats of peninsular India, this study examines the link between stream flow, agricultural water use and economic returns to agriculture. The study attempts to simulate the likely impacts of regeneration of a degraded forest catchment on stream flow and the consequent impact on irrigation tank-based agriculture in a downstream village. The authors find that regeneration of forests would reduce the ratio of runoff to rainfall in the forested catchment thereby significantly reducing the probability of filling the well-used irrigation tank. This in turn reduces the probability of the command area farmers being able to cultivate an irrigated paddy crop, particularly in the summer season, thereby reducing expected farm income as well as wage income for landless and marginal landowning households. The study results seem counter intuitive to conventional wisdom. This result is, however, not because the hydrological relationships in this region are peculiar, but because the community immediately downstream of the forest is using water in a particular manner, viz., through irrigation tanks for growing water-intensive crops. The main implication is that policymakers must move away from simplistic notions of forests being good for everything and everybody under all circumstances, and facilitate context-specific, ecologically and economically informed forest governance.
Ecosystem Services: Origins, Contributions, Pitfalls, and Alternatives
(2013) Lele, Sharachchandra; Springate-Baginski, Oliver; Lakerveld, Roan; Deb, Debal; Dash, Prasad
"The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has taken the environmental science and policy literature by storm, and has become almost the approach to thinking about and assessing the nature-society relationship. In this review, we ask whether and in what way the ES concept is a useful way of organising research on the nature-society relationship. We trace the evolution of the different versions of the concept and identify key points of convergence and divergence. The essence of the concept nevertheless is that the contribution of biotic nature to human well-being is unrecognised and undervalued, which results in destruction of ecosystems. We discuss why this formulation has attracted ecologists and summarise the resultant contributions to research, particularly to the understanding of indirect or regulating services. We then outline three sets of weaknesses in the ES framework: confusion over ecosystem functions and biodiversity, omission of dis-services, trade-offs and abiotic nature, and the use of an economic valuation framework to measure and aggregate human well-being. Underlying these weaknesses is a narrow problem frame that is unidimensional in its environmental concern and techno-economic in its explanation of environmental degradation. We argue that an alternative framing that embraces broader concerns and incorporates multiple explanations would be more useful, and outline how this approach to understanding the nature-society relationship may be implemented."
Godsend, Sleight of Hand, or Just Muddling Through: Joint Management in India
(1998) Lele, Sharachchandra
"The main attempt in this paper has been to chalk out a middle path between one extreme of taking state pronouncements of radical ideological shifts too literally and the other of characterizing the state, the only actor presume to have some agency, as a monolithic rent-seeking turf-maximizing entity. I presented evidence from two sectors across several provinces in India in favour of a richer framework that differentiates between participation and devolution, between joint management and decentralization, and then explains the range of state responses to the concept of community participation as being the outcome of the compulsions and motivations of several different actors inside and outside the 'state'. I would argue that in a country like India with a well-entrenched democratic setup and a vibrant civil society, the rent-seeking model of the state has a limited life-span. The process of liberalization and structural adjustment has temporarily shifted the balance of power towards the international donor agencies and also given greater legitimacy to the non-governmental sector. But the political arm of the democratic state and its constituencies will not remain bypassed for long. Whether that it does that consciously through a West Bengal-type internalization of the decentralization agenda or take the populist - and necessary haphazard - route as in Andhra Pradesh remains to be seen."
Godsend, Sleight of Hand, or Just Muddling Through: Joint Water and Forest Management in India
(2000) Lele, Sharachchandra
"Policies promoting the 'joint management' (i.e. between the state and resource users) of resources such as forests or water are currently in vogue in India and elsewhere. Many see advantage in the decentralised administration that these arrangements imply. However, they also imply a redistribution of power and so are profoundly political, and their success, if real, cannot be fully explained in terms of a rent-seeking, all-powerful, bureaucratic state. This paper lays out the more complex politics underpinning joint management, assessing interaction between the political and administrative wings of government and the influence of semi-autonomous actors such as donors, NGOs and academics, and identifies the potential for and route towards more, if gradual, decentralisation in the future."
Implications of trends in Access, Benefits and Status of Common Lands in Karnataka
(2011) Lele, Sharachchandra; Purushothaman, Seema
"We define Common Property Land Resources (CPLRs) as all common land resources to which the public or some communities have de facto access to, irrespective of the rights of exclusion, management or alienation. The wider academic literature contains debates about the usefulness of CPLRs, with advocates pointing to CPLRs as social safety nets, and critics favouring privatisation and individual land grant as being more efficient, especially in light of increasing developmental pressures and consequent markets for land. How the the problem is framed (CPLRs for what?) and how institutional arrangements are taken into account in evaluating economic outcomes of current and alternative models of CPLR governance will critically influence the outcome of this debate. We examine this debate in the context of Karnataka state in India. There is enormous diversity and complexity in tenure regimes under the broad category of CPLRs, and wide variation in their spatial distribution. Temporally, one sees consistent declines in certain CPLRs due to state giveaways, and some evidence for declining CPLR dependence as well, although this is sometimes a consequence of privatization. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence of The historical endowment of CPLRs varies geographically and temporally, they generate significant use and non-use values at local and global scales. We then look at the drivers of change in CPLR area and condition, as well as the ecological and distributional impacts of these changes, using a clear normative framework. When we examine these debates in the context of Karnataka’s CPLRs, we find an undiminished need to have well-managed rural CPLRs. The paper then looks at the governance reforms that may be necessary to manage and prevent conversion of CPLRs as well as to revive stakeholder interest."
Joint Forest Planning and Management (JFPM) in the Eastern Plains Region of Karnataka: A Rapid Assessment
(2005) Lele, Sharachchandra; Kumar, A. K. Kiran; Shivashankar, Pravin
"Over the past decade Joint Forest Management (JFM) has become the key concept through which forest generation activities are being implemented in most parts of India. This study was a rapid independent assessment of the JFPM activities conducted by Karnataka Forest department under a massive loan from the Japanese Bank for International Co-operation, focusing on the northern and southern maidan regions. The assessment used data from various sources at different scales and depth, including macro-level data gathered by the department itself, responses to a mail-in questionnaire, observations from brief field visits to a number of villages, and from in-depth case studies in a few villages. "The study uncovered several lacunae in the way JFPM was being undertaken. Many of the basic tenets of joint planning and management, like consultation with villagers and setting up of Village Forest Committees (VFCs) are being violated from the outset. The selection of villages has been poor. Most VFCs exist in name only with poor participation of the village general body. "Some of the lacunae in JFPM implementation are due to lacunae in the basic framework for JFPM. It is also true that the Eastern Plains region presents special challenges to JFPM implementation. But genuine JFPM is generally absent even in pockets where favourable conditions exist. On the contrary, the few success stories are often cases of exploiting existing hierarchies to meet narrowly defined goals. Thus, the major cause of the poor quality of JFPM processes and outcomes is the refusal of the implementation agency to seriously commit itself to the concept of participatory, people-oriented forestry."
Practicing Interdisciplinarity
(2005) Lele, Sharachchandra; Norgaard, Richard B.
"We explore the practical difficulties of interdisciplinary research in the context of a regional- or local-scale project. We posit four barriers to interdisciplinarity that are common across many disciplines and draw on our own experience and on other sources to explore how these barriers are manifested. Values enter into scientific theories and data collection through scientists hidden assumptions about disciplines other than their own, through the differences between quantitative and interpretive social sciences, and through roadblocks created by the organization of academia and the relationship between academics and the larger society. Participants in interdisciplinary projects need to be self-reflective about the value judgments embedded in their choice of variables and models. They should identify and use a core set of shared concerns to motivate the effort, be willing to respect and to learn more about the other,be able to work with new models and alternative taxonomies, and allow for plurality and incompleteness."
Supreme Court and India's Forests
(2008) Rosencranz, Armin; Lele, Sharachchandra
"The T N Godavarman vs Union of India case in the Supreme Court, also known as the forest case is an example of the judiciary overstepping its constitutional mandate. The court has effectively taken over the day-to-day governance of Indian forests leading to negative social, ecological, and administrative effects."
Thinking about Ecological Sustainability
(2006) Lele, Sharachchandra
"The concept of sustainability emerged in the mid-20th century as a fairly straightforward notion in the management of renewable natural resources such as forests and fisheries. In this narrower context, the term simply meant extracting from a resource stock at a rate below the stock's natural growth rate. In the 1980s, however, the term began to be used in broader context. A (re)defining moment came when the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission) popularised the term as sustainable development, which it defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED, 1987). Today, the term has become ubiquitous. People are talking about sustainable health, livelihoods, communities, transport, cities and even defence! "While such indiscriminate usage undermines the power of the concept, there is no doubt that the idea of sustainability has touched a chord somewhere. Indeed, it has almost replaced or become synonymous with environmental soundness amongst activists, analysts and policy-makers alike. Sustainability science is the new buzzword amongst environmental scientists abroad. But what does sustainability really mean? What are its nuances, underlying assumptions, strengths and limitations? This article is an attempt to explore these questions."
Why, Who, and How of Jointness in Joint Forest Management: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Insights from the Western Ghats of Karnataka
(1998) Lele, Sharachchandra
"Joint Forest Management (JFM) has become the new catchphrase in forest management in India today, being regarded as a beacon of hope by the pro-people lobby and as a donor-imposed fashion by many hardline foresters. Neither characterization is entirely inaccurate, but JFM is probably best seen as an experiment with institutional arrangements for achieving the goals of forest policy; an experiment that is now being attempted in at least 15 states of the country, covering most of the forested regions. "There is now an extensive literature on the ongoing experiments and experiences with JFM in India (SPWD, 1993; Poffenberger and McGean, 1996, Wasteland News, various issues). Much of the discussion naturally focuses on specifics -- the manner in which the concept is being implemented in various regions and concerns therein. There are also attempts to draw some generalizations from these specific experiences on the ecological, economic or institutional issues (the categorization currently in vogue) of JFM. "I shall focus here on the conceptual basis of JFM, not on any of its specific implementations. In keeping with the objectives of this workshop, I shall focus particularly on the question of 'jointness' in management, and shall examine three broad questions: the why, who, and how of joint management. I shall begin by presenting what appear to be the currently accepted answers to these questions. I shall then use a combination of theoretical and empirical arguments (the latter based largely on ongoing research in the Western Ghats forests of Karnataka) to critically examine these answers and to present an alternative perspective."