Gendered participation in community forest governance in India

Abstract

Recent forest governance practices in India have responded to environmental change and subsequent livelihood insecurity by focusing resource governance policies on communities. A paradigm shift has occurred involving participatory inclusive bottom-up approaches, rather than state-centric, top-down forestry. With the formulation of the 1988 National Forest Policy, several variants of participatory models of forest governance–social forestry, community forestry, joint forest management–have been tried out, with differing degrees of success. The 2006 Forests Right Act adopts a rights-based approach to participatory forestry to address the serious concerns of environmental degradation, livelihood insecurity, tenure reforms and questions of autonomy and identity of forest-dependent communities. Using mainly qualitative methodology, this paper reviews forest governance policies and undertakes a critical examination of recent participatory forestry practices. Drawing empirical evidence from two community-based forest governance institutions in the state of Odisha in eastern India, the paper demonstrates how participatory forestry programmes, albeit successful, may be exclusionary with regard to women’s engagement in cases where their involvement is under-represented.