This book critically explores the political ecology of human marginalization, wildlife conservation and the role of the state in politicizing conservation frameworks, drawing on examples from forests in India. The book specifically demonstrates the nuances within human-environmental linkages, by showing how environmental concerns are not only ecological in content but also political. In India a large part of the forests and their surrounding areas were inhabited far before they were designated as protected areas and inviolate zones, with the local population reliant on forests for their survival and livelihoods. Thus, socioecological conflicts between the forest dependents and official state bodies have been widespread. This book uses a political ecology lens to explore the complex interplay between current norms of forest conservation and environmental subjectivities, illustrating contemporary articulation of forest rights and the complex mediations between forest dependents and different state and non-state bodies in designing and implementing regulatory standards for wildlife and forest protection. It foregrounds the issues of identity, migration and cultural politics while discussing the politics of conservation. Through a political ecology approach, the book not only is human-centric but also makes significant use of the role of non-humans in foregrounding the conservation discourse, with a particular focus on tigers. The book will be of great interest to students and academics studying forest conservation, human–wildlife interactions and political ecology.

Analyses on the ecological, social, economic, and institutional aspects of forest policy.

Modern Forests is an environmental, institutional, and cultural history of forestry in colonial eastern India. By carefully examining the influence of regional political formations and biogeographic processes on land and forest management, this book offers an analysis of the interrelated social and biophysical factors that influenced landscape change. Through a cultural analysis of powerful landscape representations, Modern Forests reveals the contention, debates, and uncertainty that persisted for two hundred years of colonial rule as forests were identified, classified, and brought under different regimes of control and were transformed to serve a variety of imperial and local interests. The author examines the regionally varied conditions that generated widely different kinds of forest management systems, and the ways in which certain ideas and forces became dominant at various times. Through this emphasis on regional socio-political processes and ecologies, the author offers a new way to write environmental history. Instead of making a sharp distinction between third-world and first-world experiences in forest management, the book suggests a potential for cross-continental comparative studies through regional analyses. The book also offers an approach to historical anthropology that does not make apolitical separations between foreign and indigenous views of the world of nature, insisting instead that different cultural repertoires for discerning the natural, and using it, can be fashioned out of shared concerns within and across social groups. The politics of such cultural construction, the book argues, must be studied through institutional histories and ethnographies of statemaking. In conclusion, the author offers a genealogy of development as it can be traced from forest conservation in colonial eastern India.

The rapid loss of tropical forests, particularly in the developing world, has been a global concern since the late 1980s and has prompted a variety of international initiatives to save the forests. In 1991, the World Bank responded to global concerns and to criticism by nongovernmental organizations by forming a conservation-oriented forest strategy. Managing a Global Resource is an outgrowth of the independent evaluation conducted by the World Bank's Operations Evaluation Department and discusses how effectively that strategy was implemented. In this detailed investigation, Uma J. Lele explores why the loss of forests and biodiversity has been so rapid in some developing countries (Brazil, Indonesia, and Cameroon) and not in others (China, India, and Costa Rica). She assesses future prospects for conservation in these six countries by critically examining their policies, institutional arrangements, and emerging national and international instruments to conserve forests and biodiversity. Together these six countries account for 25 percent of the world's forest cover and 44 percent of the world's population. Managing a Global Resource presents case studies of the forest sectors of each country in the context of overall development policies, interest groups, and governance issues. Lele's investigation finds a fundamental divergence in forest-rich countries between the global objectives of conservation and the local objectives of development and private profit. In some forest-poor countries, in contrast, natural resource loss has led the countries on their own accord to adopt a variety of conservation-oriented policies and programs. Despite the greater congruence between the global and national objectives in these forest-poor countries, competing demands on their resources and the constraints on their policies, institutions, and human capital make it difficult for them to affect forest and biodiversity conservation. This volume makes it clear that