Selling Environmental Services: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustaining Local Resource Management: Lessons from Joint Forest Management Experience in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

"Community based forest resource management institutions, commonly known as Village Forest Committees (VFCs), are increasingly being established under Government of India's Joint Forest Management (JFM) policy all over the country to help restore the nation's degraded forests. The VFCs, besides having a direct and active role in protection and management of these forests, are entitled to various timber and other forest products for their services rendered in restoring these areas. While some VFCs are functioning well in certain situations, in a majority of places, they do not last long. This poor sustainability situation of the VFCs is threatening the whole concept of JFM that paved the way for the emergence (resurgence) of community-based forest resource governance in a revolutionary manner. A major reason for such a decline is lack of enough incentives for local people for them to be really enthusiastic about forest management. This is particularly so when JFM is introduced in highly degraded forests that offer no immediate tangible forest benefits to the local people involved. Unfortunately, the current JFM strategy is primarily built on the notion that local communities can manage forests if their costs involved in undertaking this task are compensated with resultant forest produce such as fuel, fodder, timber, and NTFP. Accordingly, most state statutes on JFM elaborately talk of sharing arrangements for these benefits. There is however, hardly ever any discussion on compensating the forest fringe communities for the environmental services rendered by them through improved forest protection and ecological restoration entailed in JFM. The need for such a pay off becomes particularly significant when these communities are helping restore highly degraded forests but receive no perceivable benefit under the current JFM policies that closely tied the incentives available in JFM just to forest produce. Strongly attesting the above observation, an empirical study of a JFM program in Tamil Nadu, India, not only highlights the significance of the environmental service benefit aspect of this forest restoration, but also shows some potential for making the functioning of VFCs financially viable, availing this service. It is endeavored to give an overview of these opportunities and circumstances in this paper, based on an in depth analysis of the efforts of Forest Department and villagers involved in selling the message of enhanced water supplies made available through JFM in order to ensure the sustainability of these local resource governance systems."