Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal: Democracy, Development, and Political Action

Abstract

Participatory conservation and development initiatives have proliferated all over the world as the 1990s became the decade for restructuring states and celebrating civil society. Examining one such major effort, called joint forest management, I propose several new directions for the anthropology of modernity, development, and environment. I scrutinize processes of local statemaking in the forests of southern West Bengal, India, to reveal key tensions between development and democratization through an ethnography of political action, [bureaucracy, democracy, development, ethnicity, forest conservation, identity politics, science and technology, the state, India]Modernity has an independent, living, and simultaneously ancient and highly up-to-date wellspring of meaning in its midst: political freedom. The latter is not exhausted by daily use; instead, it bubbles up with greater life and vigor. Beck, 1998The anthropology of modernity could well take as its task the cultural analysis of political freedom. In many countries, notably India, development became the main 20th-century aspiration of free nationhood, and socialist democracy the chosen route to this desired future. To study political freedom, then, it would be instructive to focus analysis on the contentions and effervescence generated by simultaneous pursuit within nation-states of development and democracy. In this article, I take up this challenge by showing how the changing landscape for the politics of development yields a key tension between the technocratic practices of development managers and the newly pluralistic political practices created by processes of democratization. Development has always provoked strong opinions among those engaged in it or affected by it. But the spectrum of controversy surrounding development has widened rapidly during the last two decades. The diversification and expansion of debates about development is evident in several quarters. The effects of a proliferation of practitioners with differing perceptions of the normative basis of development are compounded by the fact that political-economic and geo-strategic considerations order the priorities of developers even when they do agree on development's basic goals. Over the last 50 years, the rapid increase and divergence of contexts of development around the world ensures that development is not simply an accumulation of experience, but involves different histories. Some of this variety has been documented, chiefly by anthropologists, in studiesfocused on indigenous knowledge threatened with extinction by the spread of modern developmentalist knowledge (see Brokensha et al. 1980; Brush and Stabinsky 1996; American Ethnologist 2 7(2):431 -461.

Democratic Decentralisation through a Natural Resource Lens: An Introduction

“…In Baviskar's case study of Madyha Pradesh, India, the chasm is produced by the contradiction between procedural participatory objectives of decentralisation and the instrumental objectives of donor programs [see also Shivaramakrishnan, 2000]. Donors pre-specify the objectives that local people are supposed to adopt as their own -or 'participate in' -while creating incentives for project managers to achieve these objectives through specific success indicators.…”

Territorialisation and marginalisation in the forested landscapes of Orissa, India

“…Sophisticated systems of cadastral mapping, surveys and forest notifications have been used to formalise rights in forested areas of India since the 19th century, 2 converting erstwhile agroforestry landscapes into discrete legal categories of legal forests and non-forest lands (Sivaramakrishnan, 2000). As in other countries, extension of state regulation over land and forests was driven by the need for state income from land revenue and forest exploitation, as well as the strategic imperative to bring these areas within the control of the government (Sivaramakrishnan, 2000). Large areas of forested landscapes were enclosed as state-owned forests, while pockets of cultivation were demarcated as villages.…”

Caring for Xate, caring for Xateros: NGO monitoring, livelihoods, and plant-human relations in Uaxactún, Guatemala

“…The concession is therefore part of a broad shift in global conservation during the late 20 th century towards community forest management, one which has been widely analyzed and critiqued in terms of its reconfigurations of politics, knowledge, subjectivity, and environmental and subsistence practices (e.g. Agrawal 2005;Pacheco et al 2008;Sivaramakrishnan 2000;Zerner 1994).…”