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ABSTRACT
This article provides a comprehensive critique of the culturalist idealizations of community, associated with an essentially tenuous version of environmentalism. To this end, it analyses an ‘eco-governmentality’, observed in the implementation of joint forest management (JFM) policy in India and, in doing so, engages with a rethinking on the historical definitions of community. An explanation of community, popularized by the works of pioneering sociologists like Ferdinand Tonnies and Louis Wirth, had largely built on some immutable dimensions. Most of such dimensions offered are organized on the notion that communities are intractable as well as organic, inhabit a distinct geographical location and have a socio-cultural system relatively undisturbed by external forces. The present study, based on empirical observations from the eco-governmentality of JFM in India, brings in insights to critique the aforementioned line of thought. It offers two levels of insights: (1) a collective can represent itself as a community through shared experiences of marginalization as well as subject-formation, (2) the solidarity of a collective as a community is often invoked as a ‘moral rhetoric’, to ‘exploit the political obligations that the government have for looking after the poor and the underprivileged section of the population’.Footnote1
Acknowledgements
A section of this manuscript was presented at the Second Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN), entitled ‘Political Ecology, the Green Economy and Alternative Sustainabilities’, held at Oslo, Norway, from 20th to 22 June 2018. Comments from the audiences of the respective panel were immensely helpful in revising this manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing detailed comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Words from Chatterjee (1998: 281)
2. The JFM initiative at the Arabari Forest Range in the East Midnapore Forest Division, also known as the ‘Arabari experiment’, commenced during 1972, by the efforts of Dr Ajit Kumar Banerjee, the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of the region. He realized that the degrading Sal forests of Arabari cannot be regenerated without the cooperation of the local people, who depended upon the forests for their livelihood. Around 1272 ha of forest was brought under the joint regeneration programme, by creating Forest Protection Committees (FPCs) in the villages around the forest. The initiative proved to a success, since by 1988, around 700 ha of Sal forests was regenerated.
3. In this paper, we refer to the SBR or Indian Sundarban only, unless mentioned otherwise.
4. STR lies within the 4263 km² of forested area of the SBR. It was notified in 1973 under Project Tiger scheme of the government of India. It covers an area of 2584.89km², out of which 1699.62km² is considered as the core area or the Critical Tiger Habitat (CTH).
5. Forest fishing in Sundarban is accomplished in the creeks and the rivulets interspersed within the forest area. The people who fish in the forests are known as forest fishers. They do not practise marine fishing. They fish crabs, prawn seeds and other fish species, using human-rowed wooden boats and hand-made fishing nets.
6. The BLCs are now mainly owned by rich agriculturalists and middlemen, whose ancestors were fishers. The middlemen buy fish from the fishermen when they return from fishing. These middlemen, known as aratdaars or khotidaars, lend money to the fishermen and provide them with boats and nets on the condition that the fish caught has to be sold to them at concessional rates. The poor fishermen, who are in present need of the BLCs, thus have to rent them from the aratdaars (Sen and Pattanaik Citation2017a, 867; also see Jalais 2010).
7. According to the government resolution no. 2063-For/6M-28/02 dated 25/10/2014, the committees under have been renamed as JFMCs from Eco Development Committees (EDCs), to ensure uniformity in the access to the usufruct benefits.
8. The Bon-O-Bhumi Sanskar Sthayee Samitee is the local name for a committee constituted under each block-level panachayat of West Bengal, which, among other tasks, is responsible for the protection of forest resources and promotion of JFM.
9. The forest area of SBR, which lies outside the STR, is a reserved forest.
10. The forests of SBR is divided into the STR with an area of 2584.89 km² and the South 24 Parganas forest division with an area of the remaining 1678.11 km².
11. TMC is the current ruling party in the state. They came to power since 2011, defeating the left-front government (Communist Party of India-Marxist/CPI-M) and winning 190 out of 294 seats in West Bengal Legislative Assembly.
12. Gitanjali Housing Scheme is implemented in the rural areas and non-municipal urban areas by the Government of West Bengal, Housing Affairs in coordination with seven other government departments. Under the programme, INR 1,94,000 is allocated to the beneficiaries of the forest fringe areas of Sundarban by the forest department and for the beneficiaries residing in other non-forest coastal areas by the Sundarbans Affairs Department, for building sustainable rural houses.
13. Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) forms the largest part of the left wing parties in India, followed by Communist Party of India (CPI), Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and All India Forward Bloc. They came to power in 1977 and had a historic rule for 34 years in West Bengal till 2011.
14. The committee which represents the village of Patharpara.
15. A village adjacent to Patharpara.
16. For planting 400 saplings, INR 1,38,422 is allocated by the panchayat.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amrita Sen
Amrita Sen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Urban Ecological Sustainability, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Prior to joining APU, she was a doctoral research scholar in sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Her areas of research are political ecology, urban environmentalism, conservation politics and community based natural resource management.
Sarmistha Pattanaik
Sarmistha Pattanaik is an Associate Professor in sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. From 2006-2008, she was a fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development (CISED), Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore. Her research areas are sociology of development and environment, political ecology, tribal issues interlinking development, ecology and environmentalism and land acquisition related to governance.