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New institutions created through decentralisation policies around the world, notwithstanding the rhetoric, are often lacking in substantive democratic content. New policies for decentralised natural resource management have transferred powers to a range of local authorities, including private associations, customary authorities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Scholars see such transfers as detrimental to the legitimacy of local democratic institutions, leading to a fragmentation of local authority and dampening prospects for democratic consolidation. In much of this critique, however, there is limited attention to the wider democratic context (or lack thereof) and its effect on local governments. This article develops the concept of political articulation to characterise the relationship between citizens and elected representatives and argues that accountability in decentralisation cannot be conceptualized or analyzed separately from the accountability of higher institutions of representation and governance. The empirical analysis of the article uses the experience of a World Bank-funded Eco-development Project in Himachal Pradesh, India, to generate insights into the role of political articulation in analyzing decentralisation reforms.

New institutions created through decentralization policies around the world, notwithstanding the rhetoric, are often lacking in substantive democratic content. New policies for decentralized natural resource management have transferred powers to a range of local authorities, including private associations, customary authorities, and NGOs. Scholars see such transfers as detrimental to the legitimacy of local democratic institutions, leading to a fragmentation of local authority and dampening prospects for democratic consolidation. In much of this critique, however, there is limited attention to the wider democratic context (or lack thereof) and its effect on local governments. This article develops the concept of political articulation to characterize the relationship between citizens and elected representatives, and argues that accountability in decentralization cannot be conceptualized or analyzed separately from the accountability of higher institutions of representation and governance. The empirical analysis of the paper uses the experience of World Bank-funded Ecodevelopment Project in Himachal Pradesh, India, to generate insights into the role of political articulation in analyzing decentralization reforms.

Forests of the Western Himalayas, particularly the hill districts of colonial Punjab in India, became sites of intense negotiations over issues of demarcation of state property and definition of user rights in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even as the debates over the Indian Forest Act came to a close. In implementing newfound powers, the Forest Department was frustrated, first, by the character­isation of the region as anomalous by the Revenue Department, and second, by overt resistance from local communities. In the web of interests and ideologies, emerging interactions between state and social actors were crystallised, and defined the contours of state-society relationships. In the process of negotiating the demarcation of forests, inter-departmental rivalries between the Revenue and Forest Departments intersected with the tension between central direction and local autonomy. Legal categories enshrined in the law were reinterpreted in imaginative dimensions to correspond with local practices and new ways of imagining forests emerged that defied, and sometimes contradicted, the spirit of the law. The result could be seen as a compromise between positions of extensive and intensive territorialisation within the state, which graded forests hierarchically in new categories, nested within the law and created a supra-tenure that went beyond legal categories. Such an optic helps in better understanding and explaning the variation in the project of territorialisation in colonial India.

Agrarian tensions between landowners and tenants in colonial Punjab escalated steadily through the early decades of the 20th century, even as the colonial state struggled to address the rising threat of soil erosion from the sub-montane tracts to the growing irrigation economy. Coercive strategies for control of erosion were thwarted by 'illegible' landscapes that defied the natural/agrarian dichotomy of colonial property. At the same time, policy efforts at addressing agrarian trends of increasing indebtedness and tenants' resistance failed to have any impact. In response to the dual threat, to the political economy of irrigation and to the rule of law and maintenance of order, a new technology of government was introduced. This took the form of 'community' institutions, whereby landowners were organized into cooperatives for the management of 'illegible' landscapes. These institutions served a dual purpose; they located these lands within the colonial grid of property for the purpose of legibility, in addition to incorporating landowners into the expanding political economy of forest products, particularly pine resin. However, landowners recruited state power to their own ends and used the institutions to delegitimize the claims of tenants over these lands, thus exacerbating agrarian tensions. The optic of governmentality provides an appropriate lens to analyze the negotiation of power in this case; the 'governmentalizing'of localities through 'community' institutions helped the colonial state in projecting its power over the hitherto 'illegible' landscape. If the fragility of the project of domination is universal, then the art of government comprises of the deployment of new technologies in response to challenges to the exercise of power; conversely, limits of the legitimating framework for the exercise of power are overcome through the maintenance of a repertoire of technologies Â? savoirfair - that could be deployed when the need arises.

Internal territorialization is described as the attempt to circumscribe the use of various resources, such as land and forests, within the boundaries of a nation-state. This translates into the creation of property rights for different social actors and the demarcation of a physical sphere wherein such rights could be exercised. The notion of permanent boundaries around forests, where local people lack property rights, is popular with all arms of the state, everywhere. This paper traces the first attempts by the colonial state in the Indian Western Himalayas to draw boundaries around forests and define the rights of local populations. The process, which intensified with the publication of a Forest Department report in 1876, was fraught with obstacles at several levels throughout its course. It met sustained resistance from the peasants, who fought restrictions on their use of the forests. More importantly, horizontal tensions across different departments and vertical tensions between local knowledge professed by provincial bureaucracy on the one hand, and central direction emanating from the scientific establishment around forest management on the other, frustrated any attempt at uniformity in state responses. All these factors worked in tandem over the last quarter of the 19'11 century in Kulu sub-division, a site saliently embedded in the emerging political economy as seen in expanding canal irrigation in the Punjab as well as rising demand for the prized timber abundant in Kulu. I argue that the project to create permanent boundaries around forests was never accomplished in Kulu, with the Forest Settlement Report of 1897 failing both to keep the people out of forests and to bridge intra-state divisions. This triumvirate of mutual tensions-local resistance, local knowledge, and central direction-was instrumental in constituting the 'state' and proved to be the salient feature of later state-society interactions.

Kangra district in the western Himalayas has been witness to a succession of institutional arrangements between the people and the state for the management of forests in the last 150 years. This history has serious implications for the sustainability of the current efforts at creating village-level institutions for the co- management of forests. In the mid-19th century, in exchange for proprietary rights over trees and timber, co-parcenary bodies of cultivators at the village level were formed and ceded the proprietary rights over the soil of the forests along with ownership of all non-timber forest products. Additionally, a one-fourth share in the proceeds from the sale of trees was also granted to this body, in order to secure its interest in timber conservancy. Over the next few decades, as the demand for timber and the need felt for securing control over timber yielding areas grew within the state, the co- parcenary bodies negotiated with the state and successfully extracted large concessions in exchange for ceding their proprietary rights over the soil. Again, in the 1930s, responding to calls of impending doom due to forest degradation and erosion, the state negotiated with communities for enclosure of forest areas it was finding it impossible to manage. The resultant forest co-operative societies were given the full income from the forests, provided they managed the forests according to simple working plans prepared by forest officers and accepted the enclosure of forest lands. Till date, in spite of offering varying degrees of incentives to local communities while at the same time trying to restrict local use, the forest department has failed to enforce its agenda of enclosure. The two cases discussed illustrate an ability of the communities to negotiate with the state, something which has been completely ignored, and sometimes negated, in the current efforts at co-management of forests. The cases also point to the futility of offering short term incentives and demonstrate the need to reconstitute the commons, with local institutions as equal partners.

Natural Resource Management Forest Bill Debate Ashwini Chhatre The debate on the draft forest bill has thrown up issues that have not been clearly addressed by the participants. This paper summarises and critically discusses the draft bill the alternative 'people's natural resource management bill', and the debate.

The draft forest bill circulated in 1982 was industry-oriented and the present bill is ostensibly conservation-oriented. It is time to press for a law that respects the legitimate needs of people living in and around forests for their subsistence requirements, while at the same time addressing the task of environmental regeneration.

Study with reference to Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), Himachal Pradesh, India

One of the most exciting areas of research in the social sciences concerns the analysis of the interaction between social and ecological/biophysical processes. The goal of many of these analyses is to improve the understanding of how and under what conditions human-nature interactions lead to positive and sustainable outcomes. Scholarship in this vast domain of human activities and interactions with the natural world has been variously referenced as sustainability science and as research on social-ecological systems, and ecosystem services.

This paper contributes to fertile debates in environmental social sciences on the uses of and potential synergies between qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches for theory development and validation. Relying on extensive fieldwork on local forest governance in India, and using a dataset on 205 forest commons, we propose a methodological innovation for combining qualitative and quantitative analyses to improve causal inference. Specifically, we demonstrate that qualitative knowledge of cases that are the least well predicted by quantitative modeling can strengthen causal inference by helping check for possible omitted variables, measurement errors, nonlinearities in posited relationships, and possible interaction effects, and thereby lead to analytical improvements in the quantitative analysis. In the process, the paper also presents a contextually informed and theoretically engaged empirical analysis of forest governance in north India, showing in particular the importance of institutional and historical factors in influencing commons outcomes.

Forests provide multiple benefits at local to global scales. These include the global public good of carbon sequestration and local and national level contributions to livelihoods for more than half a billion users. Forest commons are a particularly important class of forests generating these multiple benefits. Institutional arrangements to govern forest commons are believed to substantially influence carbon storage and livelihood contributions, especially when they incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making. However, hypothesized relationships between institutional factors and multiple benefits have never been tested on data from multiple countries. By using original data on 80 forest commons in 10 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, we show that larger forest size and greater rule-making autonomy at the local level are associated with high carbon storage and livelihood benefits; differences in ownership of forest commons are associated with trade-offs between livelihood benefits and carbon storage. We argue that local communities restrict their consumption of forest products when they own forest commons, thereby increasing carbon storage. In showing rule-making autonomy and ownership as distinct and important institutional influences on forest outcomes, our results are directly relevant to international climate change mitigation initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and avoided deforestation. Transfer of ownership over larger forest commons patches to local communities, coupled with payments for improved carbon storage can contribute to climate change mitigation without adversely affecting local livelihoods.

This article examines the relationship between local enforcement and forests used as commons. It uses a unique multicountry dataset, created over the past 15 years by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program. Drawing on original enforcement and forest commons data from 9 countries, we find that higher levels of local enforcement have a strong and positive but complex relationship to the probability of forest regeneration. This relationship holds even when the influence of a number of other factors such as user group size, subsistence, and commercial importance of forests, size of forest, and collective action for forest improvement activities is taken into account. Although several of the above factors have a statistically significant relationship to changes in the condition of forest commons, differences in levels of local enforcement strongly moderate their link with forest commons outcomes. The research, using data from diverse political, social, and ecological contexts, shows both the importance of enforcement to forest commons and some of the limits of forest governance through commons arrangements.

This article contributes to the literature on collective action around environmental co-governance by statistically analyzing original data on the experiences of 95 communities in the Indian Himalayas. We compare the performance of co-governance versus indigenous governance institutions, taking into account the causal influence of five classes of independent variables. Our analysis suggests that close involvement of government officials is negatively associated with efforts to manage forests sustainably. We identify contextual conditions that help explain why involvement of state officials has adverse consequences on resource governance outcomes. Our findings are relevant for studies of decentralization policies related to natural resource management that governments are currently pursuing in more than 60 countries.