and associates in

ISBN 0 19 564458 1

A collaborative effort of the
Asia Sustainable Forest Management Network
and the
Society for the Promotion of Wastelands Development
with support from
East West Center ? Ford Foundation ? University of California, Berkeley

? To Toby, Nathan, and all the world's forest children ?

FOREWORD

This is a book of contemporary concern narrating the emergence of grassroots forest movements in India. The book uses a historical perspective to assess the implications of shifting forest management policies and practices. In the past, people knew about their symbiotic relationship with forests and there was greater harmony between man and nature. More recently, commercial and population pressures have used the forest beyond its carrying capacity resulting in degradation. The book demonstrates that rural people are concerned over the disastrous consequences of overexploitation, including extensive soil erosion, falling ground water levels, and increases in arid micro-climates adversely affecting agricultural production and aggravating poverty. Driven by necessity, these villagers have spontaneously demonstrated their ability to protect and to restore badly degraded waste lands to productive healthy natural forests. In the past decade over 10,000 villages in the states of Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar have begun protecting and regenerating their natural sal forests, mostly unassisted by World Bank loans, bilateral grants or government projects. These predominantly tribal communities protect adjoining forests through volunteer patrols, armed only with staffs, and bows and arrows. Village men and women prevent tree felling, grazing, and fires, and in return sustainably harvest fuel, fodder, and foods. This is based on an age old tested philosophy of caring and sharing.

The book relates recent experiences with community forestry in India, setting them in an historical context, while suggesting their importance for the future. The importance of lessons and experience conveyed in this timely volume goes beyond India. The path our nation is following in empowering communities as caretakers of public lands will likely be one that is also taken by other developing nations in coming decades, and to some extent the industrialized world.

The book is targeted at a broad audience, written in a general, non-academic style, it speaks to students and professionals interested in both the social and ecological dynamics and challenges facing natural forest management today and in the future. Many experienced foresters, scientists and non-governmental organization (NGO) leaders contributed to the ideas in the book. It will be important for the tens of thousands of officers within the IFS and state cadres to read it and gain a broader understanding of the concepts, and strategies which Joint Forest Management entails.

I think one of the most fascinating aspects of the Indian experience with community forestry, is that the stabilization of natural forests is being achieved by some of the nation's poorest communities, in severely biologically disturbed forest areas. After several decades of mixed results from well-financed, technically sophisticated donor and government driven development programmes, the book suggests that there are indigenous, need-based, people-driven, low-cost ways to make some of India's forests healthy and productive again. Emerging local initiatives have the potential to be both socially just and ecologically sound. To succeed, we will need to listen to the village voices and to empower communities in forest choices.

PREFACE

The debate over the roles that communities and the state should play in managing forest resources is an ancient one. For more than 200 years, since the inception of British colonial power in India, politicians, business people, government foresters, and villagers have sparred over the issues. The dispute defies any absolute resolution. The desired path is to achieve a balance of tenurial rights and responsibility. Governments are powerful and enjoy the political, legislative, judicial, and financial strength to exert their will. Rural communities have numeric superiority, a strong, vested dependency, and a strategic geographical position in relation to the resources. Ultimately, governments rise and plummet, but the forest people, with their intuitive connections to the land, remain. Amid India's vast populace, the urgent livelihood needs of such biomass-based rural communities have motivated them to take action and assert greater control over their forests.

In the late 1980s, a group of twenty foresters, social scientists, ecologists, planners, and development specialists from South East Asia and the West wrote a book entitled Keepers of the Forest. The authors drew upon the historical record, as well as a wide range of community forestry field experiences from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The objectives were to better understand the larger socio-political forces driving deforestation and to identify ways in which socially and ecologically sound systems of forest management could be established. Representing some of the most enlightened practitioners in the field, the group concluded by unequivocally advocating the empowerment of communities to serve as "keepers" and primary beneficiaries of these important forest resources.

Five years later, concerned individuals of a diverse mix have combined their knowledge to examine the condition of India's forests and the prospects for improved productivity and management. The findings corroborate and build upon insights generated by South East Asian colleagues, and offer new perspectives and strategies towards answering the questions of both ecological and organizational sustainability in managing natural forests.

Acknowledgement needs to be given to the hundreds of Indian and British social reformers who struggled before and after Independence to recognize the importance of tribal peoples and forest rights alienation has been extremely well documented by Indian scholars over the past 50 years. Their careful research facilitates our understanding of the roots of the forest management crisis and offers insights into its resolution. While it is impossible to express our gratitude to all those individuals who have contributed to the ideas gathered in this volume we would like to mention a few whose thoughtfulness and commitment over the years has been particularly influential. They include Kamla Chowdhry, Samr Singh, N.S. Jodha, K.C. Malhotra Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narayan, Anil Shah, Robert Chambers, Ajay Mehta, Kartikeya Sarabhai, R.K. Patchauri, Shekhar Singh, Prabir Guhatakurta, Kundan and Neera Singh, Sashi Kant, Deep Pandey, Ram Sharma, J.R. Gupta, Syed Rizvi, N.C. Saxena, Tirath Gupta, S.K. Dhar, M.S. Swaminathan, B.M.S. Rathore, Raju and Manju, G.S. Mandal, P.K. Roy Choudhury, P.K. Das, I.Z. Khan, Narayan Banerjee, R.S. Pathan and F.M. Ahmed.

It is difficult to pen acknowledgements adequately in a book to which so may have contributed. Village leaders, courageous men, women, and youth who have advocated, organized, and nurtured emerging community forest protection and management groups may be personally unknown to the authors, but their good work is apparent in many thousands of villages across India. The tribal communities of India-the Bhils and Vasava of south-eastern Gujarat, the Santhals and Lodhas of south-west Bengal, the Mundas and Gonds of Orissa -are only a few of the hundreds of tribals throughout India who intimately know and cherish the forest. Against its stark disappearance, these people are acting to save the forest for their survival and posterity. We admire and thank them for their heroic efforts, as we believe that they are the ultimate managers of India's forests. We are also grateful to the many Indian Forest Service officers who acknowledge the need for change in forest management policy and practice. Increasing numbers of foresters are showing their commitment to the fundamental problems underpinning mismanagement by experimenting with new solutions through a wholly new paradigm of partnership. They, too, must lead the way with resolve into the twenty-first century.

Scores of creative individuals from India's diverse array of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), large and small, have lobbied tirelessly for policy reforms and for the improved welfare of poor forest communities. They have developed new ways to facilitate communications between foresters and villagers, and have pioneered strategies to give rural women more authority in decision-making processes over natural resources affecting their lives. They have been the advocates for the disempowered when no other voices spoke for them. Each of these groups has contributed to a remarkable phenomenon taking place in India today-a several of the alienation of forest people's rights, of institutional conflict, and of ecological patterns of forest degradation. This transformation appears part of an important historical process. While it is still too early to predict whether this movement will reshape the complexion of India's forestry, it is significant that parallel patterns of community empowerment over local resources are emerging across a much wider latitude in developing and industrialized nations alike. Against the formidable odds of intense historical conflicts and severe current pressures on India's forest resource base, the fact that groups of NGOs, government agencies, and forest communities have increasingly begun to work together, jointly confronting management problems and devising practical, highly localized solutions, is most encouraging. The synergism of the collaborative action may well solidify and accelerate this process of change. Meanwhile, the resilience witnessed in nature's response is promising. Increasing field evidence in a range of India's forest ecotypes indicates that natural forests under effective community protection can regenerate rapidly into multi-tiered, biologically diverse secondary forests. For all of India's forest people, and the ecosystems that support them, we sincerely hope they will succeed in their co-operative venture.

Preparation of this anthology was generously supported by the Ford Foundation, the Wallace Generics Foundation, the Asia Bureau of the US Agency for International Development, the USDA Forest Service International Forestry Program, and the USAID-funded Biodiversity Support Project of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Resources Institute. We are particularly grateful to Gordon Conway, Peter Geithner, Jeffrey Cambell, Molly Kux, Geogre Taylor, Stephan Kellerher, Linda Lind, Alex Moad, A. Terry Rambo, and Jeff Fox for their encouragement. We are also indebted to the East-West Center Program on Environment for providing a writing workshop and crucial logistical support to the contributors of this volume. Thanks are also due to Helen Takeuchi for her thoughtful and fine-tuned editing of the chapters, and to Mary Hayano for her dedicated hours in front the computer screen. Finally, we wish to thank the Delhi staff of Oxford University Press for bringing this book to our readers.

Contributors

S.B. Roy, Executive Director, Indian Institute for Biosocial Re-search and Development

CONTENTS

Figures and Tables

Figures

Tables

Plates

Black and White
Between pages 108 and 109

Introduction

Mark Poffenberger ? Betsy McGean

Throughout India, the destruction of natural forests for timber, cropland, fuelwood, pasture, urbanization, and commercial industry has had a profound impact on the lives of millions of rural communities. The deterioration of the nation's expansive forests has exposed critical watersheds, accelerated topsoil erosion and sedimentation of rivers and reservoirs, exacerbated flooding, and overtaxed the land's natural resilience and capacity to regenerate and sustain its productive functions. Attempts to tighten bureaucratic controls over state forests have often led to heightened conflicts among users and further assaults on the ecosystem, rather than conservation and sustainable use.

Yet this is not India's exclusive story. In fact, it mirrors a larger history of the unravelling of much of the global forest estate. The struggle for forest resource control among politicians, private business people, bureaucrats, and local communities is a persistent, all-too-common theme in many developing and developed countries. Newspaper exposés that describe how bureaucrats under political pressure awarded logging rights to contractors and multinational companies at heavily subsidized prices are as prevalent in the United States as in India or Indonesia. Across nations and borders, similarities among the intricate issues of forest management are no coincidence. The problems are deeply rooted in the historical processes through which state forestry institutions evolved over the last century. They reflect concepts of bureaucratic centralization in resource governance, authoritative legislative strategies, and management attitudes and practices that have been borrowed from tire temperate industrialized world and widely adopted in mainly less developed tropical countries. The Current global crisis in forest management is profoundly embedded in the past. It will certainly endure far into the future unless societies and their institutions understated the lessons of the past and act upon them.

This book speaks about forest management in India: its past, present, and tentative but promising, future. It documents tales of struggle, conflict, power, and control. Pressures exerted on the dwindling forests of the subcontinent have mounted exponentially in recent decades. Nowhere are demands on forest ecosystems greater than in India, where human dependencies are staggeringly high and growing rapidly, fuelled by vast human populations, livestock, and industrial demands. With a population approaching one billion and less than 10 per cent of the total land area covered by good quality, productive forest, the human-to-forest ratio is one of the lowest in the world. Yet millions of poor rural Indian families are economically dependent on forest resources for fuel, fodder, food, medicines, housing, cottage industries, and other basic needs. Overwhelming human and livestock pressures on a shrinking resource base would lead many to predict an inexorable decline of forests that ultimately concludes with exhaustion and extinction.

But remarkably, in many parts of India today, Poor rural communities are demonstrating that this scenario is not an inevitable outcome. Instead, through collective action, small village groups have begun rallying to protect and reclaim degraded forest lands, banning grazing and logging, and controlling fires. Thousands of villages have organized themselves to reassert their authority over forest tracts in an attempt to reverse degradation and restore productivity. Often with little or no assistance from the state or other outside actors, these protection groups have established access and use controls to facilitate the natural processes of ecological succession and recovery. The key to these reversals seems to lie in the transition from an open access management 'vacuum' to Controlled access and monitored utilization. This is achieved through user' group-centred controls. As tenurial rights and delineated responsibilities become vested in the riser group, conflicts are reduced, communications improve, and local knowledge once again informs decision-making. In less than one decade, large tracts of state lands that recently existed as scrub-covered wastes are now regenerating into biologically diverse, closed canopy secondary forests that produce a broad range of forest goods and ecological services.

It is striking how little information actually exists about the role of India's communities in managing the nation's precious forests. Government data ? whether forest department working-plan documents, stocking-level figures, budget accounts, industrial-timber requirements, or staff records ? fill departmental offices a-cross the country. Yet information about the location and daily forest practices of India's villages is scant or non-existent. Only with the increasing recognition of the role of communities in forest protection under the joint forest management initiative have foresters, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and re- searchers begun to collect data and document the growth of the significant grassroots forest protection movement. Outsiders who visit villages in forested districts are surprised to discover both the strength and numbers of communities actively engaged in implementing resource protection and use controls. Frequently located in remote regions where city planners and senior professionals rarely venture, these groups have gone largely unnoticed during their decades-long struggle to reclaim enough management control to protect their forest and water resources.

The response to community resource management initiatives has been mixed. Many foresters intimately familiar with the field realities of policing India's vast public forest lands, with a handful of guards against millions of impoverished people, understand its ultimate futility. Guards and forest rangers are frequently con-fronted with unrealistic implementation policies and must adapt their own informal, more practical agreements that will better ensure the survival of forests and communities. Certain innovative mid-level and senior officers have been experimenting with various forms of community-agency collaborative management models for years. Yet, until recently, there were few policies or programmes to support or sustain these endeavours. While appreciated by community groups and field NGOs, these individuals have also been criticized and held suspect by other colleague in the department. Sometimes, more traditional foresters have felt threatened, fearing that the empowerment of communities would erode the authority and legitimacy of the forest department and lead to the chaotic misuse of resources. In fact, field reports from many Indian states indicate that, in most degraded forest areas, forest departments have already lost much of their control over daily access and exploitation. In some forest ranges, field staff risk their lives in valiant attempts to stave off or reduce the illegal flow of timber and fuelwood that are steadily extracted from forest areas. Such uncontrolled access, combined with the absence of incentives among users to monitor overuse, has led to unsustainable cutting and grazing practices and has been a driving force in forest destruction. Struggling to meet their biomass survival needs, forest communities subjected to constant confrontation with the forest department no longer respect the responsibilities of the forest officers, and have been known to literally drive them out of their assigned territories.

The establishment of joint management agreements allows department field staff to redefine their relationship with the community and eventually to regain the trust and alliance of villagers. Only then can the common goal of stabilizing forest ecosystems through co-operative effort be accomplished. The choice is stark: either all parties lose when the forest is destroyed or all benefit through its regeneration and sustainable management. In this latter win-win scenario, the empowerment of community management groups to take the lead reaffirms the forest department's role as state 'custodian,' overseeing and endorsing the work of local forest-user communities.

Some government foresters continue to argue that the provision of usufruct rights to community groups gives too much away. Certain NGO leaders counter that anything less than giving all forest benefits to communities is a compromise unacceptable to the forest department. Striking a compromise may be the only politically practical way to resolve this dispute. In the name of India's commitment to social justice, clearly those with the greatest needs and rights to forest resources are the communities and tribal populations who have depended upon them, and lived in the forests for centuries. In most states today, the rights now being offered under recent joint forest management (JFM) government resolutions actually offer little more, and sometimes even less, than what these villages enjoyed under earlier settlement acts and nistar agreements. JFM agreements, however, are helping to forge new relationships between rural communities and the forest department. By formalizing and further legitimizing prior or existing rights, they provide the framework for an essential psychological security heretofore unknown, enabling communities to invest their labour and time in patrolling, protecting, and managing the forest. Admittedly, poor communities will only 1-iave an economic incentive to protect these resources if the state guarantees it will not allow an outside contractor to log the area under community protection once the trees have matured. Further, communities that close areas to grazing and fuelwood extraction forego essential income in cash and in kind while waiting for the forests to regenerate. If they fail in their protection and management duties, the forests will not regenerate, and deferred benefits will also be lost. Hence, a powerful motivation for communities to succeed is intrinsic to the strategy.

JIM programmes should not be viewed as a subsidy or give-away scheme for rural communities, but rather as long-term agreements between rural groups and government, which secure community rights to forest products in exchange for serious responsibilities. In most cases, after a set period of time under voluntary community protection, current joint management agreements are guaranteeing a certain share of the timber harvest to communities, as well as rights to non-timber forest products. More important, these agreements are officially acknowledging the vital role for the community in management. In sum, it is the covenant of trust and the co-operative sharing of rights and responsibilities that make JFM a partnership between forest departments and community groups. Given the change in attitudes, policies, and operations implied by JFM, forest departments have little more to offer communities in the early phases than this formal recognition of willing collaboration. Yet, legitimizing the forest protection and management activities of India's rural villages is a critical function. Over time, forest departments will enhance their own capacity to provide more relevant technical information regarding forest ecosystem management, non-timber forest product enrichment, processing and marketing, and local institutional management development.

This book poses many questions regarding India's experiences with community forestry. Is the widespread community response being documented in India today a desperate reaction to resource scarcities and environmental decline? Is it in part a sign of expanding democratization and local empowerment? Why is a grassroots environmental and socio-political movement expanding in some of the poorest regions of India, which also suffer the highest illiteracy rates and the most serious forest degradation? How can local community institutions sustain their systems of forest protection and management once ecosystems recover productivity and become increasingly valuable? What lessons can we learn and transfer from these emerging experiences that might assist India and the rest of the world in managing their natural forests more sustainably as we enter the twenty-first century? Framed in time and space, each chapter attempts to illuminate a piece of this complex puzzle.

Divided into three parts, the book examines the resurgence of Community forest management in India and its social, political, institutional, economic, and technical consequences. Part I reviews the historical background and the current status of grassroots forest management initiatives nationwide, and assesses the policies being enacted to support local environmental protection initiatives. In Chapter 1, the authors chart the evolution of rural environmental movements, mapping patterns of socio-political organization and exploring the forces that drive these processes. The very direct geographical overlap between forest regions, areas with severe poverty, and tribal concentrations underscores the importance of poverty alleviation and social equity in forest management. The chapter proceeds to document how communities in diverse regions of India are struggling to protect disappearing natural forests.

Chapter 2 examines historical relations between the state, forest lands, and rural communities. Centralized governmental control over natural forests emerges as a comparatively recent phenomenon of the past two centuries. Since the establishment of British colonial control in the mid-nineteenth century, state custodial authority over forests has been systematically extended. At the same time, the authors show that both as a matter of policy and in the villages, individuals have historically resisted the erosion of community forest rights. Over the past few years, national and state-level policies that support the rights and needs of rural Communities to forest resources have been formulated, beginning a reversal of century-old trends. This chapter explores how these policies might help or hinder spontaneous, indigenous management initiatives to regenerate and sustain the forests.

Chapters 3 through 5 further consider how the growth of state control over forest lands has affected rural communities. These document the many conflicting forces that have shaped past and emerging policies. A number of bewildering policies ? emanating from the revenue department to encourage agricultural expansion and an expanded tax base, from the forest department to consolidate territorial authority and commercial timber exploitation, from political powers, and from industrial interests ? have inter- faced and frequently clashed with India's diverse rural communities and their cultural traditions. As these chapters illustrate, the outcome has been conflict and unsustainable forest use. The search to develop sustainable systems of forest management, which respond to national and local needs, remains a continuing challenge. The authors believe that examining the experiences of the past century may help in a socially equitable and renewable forest utilization in the future.

Chapter 3 reviews the position of India's first Inspector General of Forests, Dietrich Brandis. In the mid-nineteenth century, Brandis was one of the first advocates for maintaining the role of Indian villages in forest management. While his unconventional views were not adopted as a policy, Ramachandra Gulia emphasizes the striking parallels between Brandis's early vision and managerial concepts, and the evolving, contemporary joint forest management strategies.

Chapter 4 examines the history of conflict between Bhil and other tribal communities in the Dangs of south-eastern Gujarat, tracing the actions of the forest department as it gradually expanded its control over forests. At the centre of the dispute was the state's rejection of traditional communal land use rights and the native agro-ecological practices of local communities. Governmental interest in controlling forest lands and preserving the industrial values of standing timber generated a direct conflict with tribal populations which viewed the forest as their ancestral home. David Hardiman carefully describes the government's opposition to long-rotation shifting agriculture (kumri), and its systematic but unsuccessful attempts to force communities to adopt sedentary agriculture. Through revolts and sabotage in the form of forest burning, alienated tribals resisted state attempts to usurp the forest domain throughout the twentieth century. Antagonism between tribal communities and the state continues even today in the Dangs, and many institutions, such as the forest labolirers' co-operatives, manipulate the situation for their own political gain. Hardiman concludes that only through the empowerment of small community groups as forest managers can the patterns of 'tribal defeat and loss of land and livelihood' be reversed to stem further decimation of the forests.

Chapter 5 chronicles the saga of tribal struggle in the 'Jungle Mahals', an ancient tribal forest region of south-western Bengal. The tale begins in the mid-eighteenth century, when the diverse hunting, gathering, and agricultural communities of the region were wrestling to maintain their independence from local rulers and powerful landlords (zamindars). Their response strategy was one of retreat, dependent upon their ability to withdraw ever more deeply into the forests when encountering outside forces. With the growth of state authority, the alienation of their agricultural lands, and the shrinkage of forest cover over the past 200 years, disempowered tribal groups became increasingly impoverished and progressively lost their ability to physically flee exploitation imposed by both the private and public sectors. Nonetheless, many of these indigenous communities have continued to resist external attempts to usurp their farmlands and erode their rights to forest lands which form the core of their sociocultural and economic systems. In recent decades, the extended tenure of a populist Marxist government in West Bengal has facilitated the resurgence of community forest management, which has received growing support from the state's forest department and NGOs. The chapter contends that indigenous environmental movements, such as those in West Bengal, provide a sound basis for the broad-based decentralization of public land management. At the same time these nascent initiatives, and the communities that spawn them, face similar types of political opposition as their ancestors. The challenge is to find ways to strengthen their local capacity to act effectively as protectors and managers of the forest estate.

India's forest communities have faced increasing marginalization for several centuries. While forest departments have grown in size and numbers, their financial and human resources remain woefully inadequate to ensure proper management of nearly one-quarter of the Indian subcontinent classified as public forest land. In Part I, the book advocates that, if given a conducive environment, forest Communities can quickly re-establish control over the use of forest and grassland resources, thereby reversing a long process of alienation and disempowerment. This will be fit from simple. Communities possess a complex history of prior rights, both formal and informal. Forest departments are firmly entrenched in institutional procedures and regulations and attitudes on both sides are often hostile towards each other.

Part II further explores the role that people and institutions can play in forging new joint management partnership between communities and forest departments. Chapter 6 analyses how India's diverse rural communities and their local institutions can work effectively, illuminating both common limitations and unrecognized strengths. Madhit Sarin describes the processes and obstacles involved in linking people with forests, defining community group membership in consideration of dependency needs, rights, and traditions. The chapter discusses the capabilities that community institutions must develop to act is effective managers, including controlling forest access and use, settling disputes, distributing produce equitably, and interacting positively with the state. Ultimately, forest departments which are interested in helping local communities build institutional management capacity must approach the task in a supportive, rather than directive, top-down manner.

In Chapter 7, Subhabrata Palit examines the challenges facing Indian forest departments as they attempt to build new skills and capacities to work closely with rural communities in micro-planning and ecosystem management. While two decades of foreign-assisted social forestry programmes in India began opening communication channels between foresters and villagers, the author notes that these failed to address basic conflicts regarding tenurial rights, equity and responsibilities over natural forest systems. Although private and community plantation projects were heavily funded little support was available to improve communal management on public forest lands. Inefficiency, cynicism, and corruption through infusions of foreign finance led to growing confrontations between communities and the forest department, and in some cases even divided the agency internally. The emergence of JFM provides an alternative foundation for collaboration. However, Palit insists that forest departments will need to make fundamental shifts in their attitudes, policies, and procedures to respond effectively to the needs of local forest management groups. Merits such as creative problem-solving, honesty, and field-based achievements must drive the incentive system, rather than seniority or politics. Foresters need to increase their capacity to undertake applied research programmes, provide technical guidance, resolve disputes, and generally support community forestry programmes. Planning systems must become transparent to allow local input into priority setting, while de-emphasizing commercial timber production to respond to a wider range of important non-timber forest products. Finally, forest departments must develop the political will and unity to succeed in devolving authority and respect to community management groups.

In Chapter 8, McGean, Roy, and Chatterjee explore strategies to create awareness, skills, and gender sensitization through working groups, training programmes, and attitudinal changes, which can facilitate co-operative action. Case studies that describe interviews with forest department beat officers and the induction of women field staff into the forest department draw upon experiences from JFM implementation and training programmes in different parts of India. Different strategies and methodologies employed by the NGOs are explored, as are mechanisms other than formal training that contribute positively to the process of change. The authors contend that interactive training with participants can indeed break through attitudinal barriers, but the role of reorientation must be taken more seriously in terms of enhancing India's current limited capacity.

In Part III, Chapters 9 and 10 review fundamental shifts in the way forest management objectives and operations are viewed. These chapters assume that natural forest management will focus increasingly on local economic and environmental needs, with commercial timber production shifting to private lands. They explore the ways in which management processes will need to be intensified to reverse degradation and re-establish healthy and productive ecosystems.

In Chapter 9, Poffenberger reviews the multiple perspectives that can be used to place values on the forest. Projecting into the future, the author explores how current forest management objectives will need to change to meet national, regional, and local needs. Because millions of Indians depend heavily on forest resources for subsistence, their needs will have to assume precedence over those of commercial users. Millions of rural people employed in small, forest-based cottage industries require improved production, processing, and marketing support. At the same time, the inevitable, long-term environmental imperatives of the subcontinent demand a more holistic approach to management. The chapter argues that this will require a serious commitment by planners, donor agencies, and forest department staff to well-targeted applied research and extension programmes. NGOs and university researchers can contribute substantially to the effort if they build their own capacity to respond to sector-specific issues. The author concludes that the quality of life for most rural Indians could be improved by converting wasted areas of former natural forest into intensively managed, biodiverse ecosystems (i.e. through regeneration and enrichment planting).

Chapter 10 examines the implications of shifting management objectives for India's natural forests from timber production towards a more holistic approach of managing the forest ecosystem. This implies de-emphasizing timber plantation and emphasizing natural forest regeneration. The regenerative powers of nature have long been recognized, but only recently has attention focused on reliance upon community-based access controls to stimulate forest regrowth.

The concluding chapter documents the impressive rates of forest regeneration that are possible, especially through coppice shoot rejuvenation from highly degraded forests, if these are Protected from further exploitation. The authors note that in many disturbed forest systems, biomass, biodiversity, and the flow of valuable non-timber forest products increase dramatically, even after short periods of three to ten years. In contrast to monoculture plantations, natural forest regeneration requires minimal capital and technical inputs, but far outperforms plantations in terms of many environmental and economic functions. Furthermore, natural forest regeneration has equity implications, often skewing benefits disproportionately to the poorest, including tribal and landless women, whose opportunity costs of collecting forest products are the lowest. For more than a century, India's natural forests have primarily been managed to optimize the production of commercially valuable timber. As community-based user groups become increasingly prominent in management decisions, forest management objectives will shift towards multiple product needs. The chapter explores various approaches to restructure forest management strategies, both in terms of goals and operational techniques, to respond to varying environmental and economic objectives.

In conclusion, the authors attempt to synthesize historical experience, case materials, and policy analysis to understand how forest conflicts and their solutions are linked temporally and spatially. India is one of the first nations to seriously consider policies and programmes that decentralize and 'de-bureaucratize' management of its public forest domain. These historic changes appear to be driven by environmental crises affecting some of the nation's poorest rural people, by the growth of democratic institutions, and by the commitment of certain leading policy-makers, scientists, and foresters to social justice and environmental restoration. At the same time, bureaucratic conservatism, scepticism, and entrenched vested interests inevitably impede such changes. The debate of the past two centuries over annexation versus populism continues today; only the stakes have risen as the importance of forests to a growing, biomass-dependent population expands.

The resurgence of community forest management on the sub-continent offers significant lessons to many developing nations engaged in similar struggles to stabilize and Sustain their forests while alleviating rural poverty. In the vanguard of a grassroots environmental movement which is spelling public land reform, India is a laboratory of experimentation and learning. The inevitable change may have arisen first from the extreme pressures on natural forest ecosystems and the consequent degradation they have suffered, both from commercial and local exploitation. But the heavy dependence of India's massive tribal and other rural Populations on forest resources have left them no choice but to reassert their control. Nature has responded with vigour to the care that local villagers are providing, rewarding some of the planet's most dispossessed and marginalized populations with stead flows of biomass products upon which they survive.

The rethinking of forest management goals in India demands new strategies that are community centred and place priority on satisfying local socio-economic and environmental needs. Moving far beyond the archaic model of centralized, custodial state management, through the various trials and phases of social forestry, the enlightened progression emerging in India today is defining a new paradigm of 'ethnoforestry'. The rationale involves ecosystem dynamics, indigenous community knowledge and creativity, local empowerment, faith in community self-reliance, and full management participation by those people who are closest to the forests, strongly dependent upon them, and highly motivated to keep them productive. After all, the largest group of environmental managers in the world are farmers, forest farmers, and forest dwellers ? more than half of whom are the planet's rural women, the key actors in biomass-based economies.

The authors of this book unite in their common belief that the seeds of India's future forests lie in indigenous systems of management, the unleashing of creative human resources, and the assurance of tenurial incentives for forest-based communities. India's grassroots experiences of ethnoforestry can be replicated across regions and nation-states, provided communities are allowed to regain management authority over the integral resources that sustain their livelihoods. To this end, political powers and influential donor agencies will need to restrain commercial and financial interests, and instead encourage forest bureaucracies to facilitate the socio-political processes of public land reform.