Institutional Dissonance in Forest Management in Meghalaya, India

Abstract

"In the Meghalaya state, located in north eastern part of India, majority of forests are owned by the community and not the government. Despite this, the management of forests is influenced by a complex set-up of customary and government imposed regulations. Since last decade, several efforts have been made to regulate and control timber trade both in the name of protecting people's livelihoods and environment, but the desired impacts have not been achieved. There are two main views to address this problem: one view posits that in the absence of effective alternative, the community-based management needs to be strengthened. The other school argues that the customary arrangements of forest management need to be replaced with formal 'state supported system'.

"Drawing from review of literature and recently concluded field work, I argue that neither view is based on critical empirical assessment of the role different institutions involved in the management of forests in Meghalaya. This is because the problem is neither with the community-based management nor with the state imposed regulation for management of forests. The current situation has resulted from the absence of any management due to conflicting interests of different institutions in benefiting from commercialization of forests. This has been masked by the debates on failure of community-based forest management in Meghalaya. The problem, therefore, is that of institutional dissonance, resulting from layering of incongruent institutional structures. In the case of Meghalaya, there are three such institutions which mediate forest use through a set of interacting and overlapping rules and regulations. They are: state forest department, forest department wing of the district councils and the traditional village (or cluster of village-based) organizations. This paper provides an overview of how conflicts between these three actors have led to current state of affairs in Meghalaya."