The Political Economy of Decentralised Forest Management in India: Civil Society and the State

Abstract

"The paper is divided into three main sections. The next section (Section 1) starts with an examination of development discourse which emerged in the 1980s with particular reference to the manner in which civil society was privileged and the state recast. This sets the background for a more detailed discussion in terms of the role of civil society in forest management in India and the manner in which this role has been intrinsically linked to the state's good governance project. Section 2 grapples with an 'autonomous' civil society and the possibilities and limits of such a sphere in terms of decentralised forest management. The third section revisits the state and the possibilities of a rights based discourse for problematising the forests as commons."