J MARTINEZ-ALIER

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A small band of anthropologists, political scientists, ecologists and economists left aside the ideological debate and started, in the 1970s and 1980s in different parts of the world, to study in depth the systems of management of common property resources. Indian authors N S Jodha and Madhav Gadgil made major contributions. The provision of fuelwood, pastures and water by the commons to the meagre livelihoods of poor people in India was calculated. The “participatory exclusions” (Bina Agarwal’s term) because of caste and gender have been studied. India’s “sacred groves” became well known, inspiring anthropologists working elsewhere to look for similar institutions. The collective logic of rotations in swidden agriculture (similar in a way to the logic of rotations in open-field systems) was explained. Systems of regulation of irrigation water were analysed. The growth of joint forest management in the 1980s and 1990s gave strength to the field. The concrete conditions under which common property led to acceptable environmental results were explored. There were some neoclassical economists who, true to their calling, showed the formal equivalence, given appropriate assumptions, between private property and commons property (something one may disprove by plausibly assuming longer time horizons and lower social discount rates for commons property managers than for private owners).

Arun Agrawal was still a student when much of this intellectual ferment arose. He has been raised in the international school of the study of common property resources (particularly with Elinor Ostrom) to which this book makes an outstanding contribution. He provides an excellent detailed analysis of forest councils in the villages of Kumaon from the 1930s onwards, with an emphasis on the 1990s. As early as 1931, forest council rules were enacted to regulate the relations between the colonial state and communities. This is certainly an early date. After decades of conflict, the British administration realised that the cooperation of local inhabitants was necessary to manage the forests. The number of forest councils in Kumaon has increased since then. In 1976 (shortly after Chipko, one should notice) the forest council rules were rewritten to make them more favourable to villagers. Many villagers of Kumaon now explicitly speak in favour of conserving the forests because of the benefits they provide for livelihood. Therefore, according to Agrawal, they have become “environmental subjects” through state intervention (hence the words “technologies of government” in the subtitle) and through their own experience and knowledge. Agrawal explains that the efficacy of local regulatory institutions depends on a number of variables. The conditions for the enforcement of rules, the statistics on infractions and sanctions, the importance of the size of council, the costs of surveillance, the caste and gender divisions, are all taken into account. The research is based on long periods of field work, archival and library research, and sociological surveys.

Before the 1930s, and the state’s gradual return of appropriated land to the communities, there had been a period of great conflicts. The colonial state, as it is well known, had slowly imposed a logic of forest rights and management adopted from German forest engineering and economics, suited, if at all, to Prussian-like tree plantations, but not to the social and biological diversity of India. Agrawal insists that the British administration started to overlie the forest with botanical names in Latin and with a torrent of statistics. He is vaguely aware of the link to today’s eco-efficiency and “wise use” movement, but in my view, he does not really understand the forest engineering and economics imposed on India. He is not strong in economics, although this is an unfair critique against an author so knowledgeable in anthropology, political science and sociology.

Nowadays, one can see forest economics as a long trajectory from Faustmann’s rule of 1849 to PES, i e, payment for environmental services. Faustmann explained that a private forest owner (or a

Economic and Political Weekly May 6, 2006 state agency owning a plantation forest, and bent on maximising profits), would compare the rate of growth of the trees (which declines with time) with the rate of interest paid by the bank. The “trees” are here understood as timber multiplied by price, less harvest costs. The comparison would yield the optimal moment for cutting the trees, before the next planting. So an owner should not cut everything in sight as soon as possible. A concept of sustainability was already involved here. Faustmann added another factor to be taken into account. The land denuded of trees could earn some rent, for grazing or agriculture – this would shorten the optimal period for cutting the trees. Nowadays, by including non-timber products (for trade or for local livelihood according to local knowledge and use), services of water retention and prevention of soil erosion, the value of a home for biodiversity, and carbon dioxide uptake, and then monetarising these real or fictitious commodities into the bottom line, one may reach the conclusion that the optimal moment of cutting the trees will be much later or will never arrive. Moreover, if one mistrusts, as it is reasonable, the monetary values given to non-market services, then one may move outside of economics into a logic of multi-criteria evaluation of forests (as Kanchan Chopra and other authors have done). This is precisely the logic of the van panchayats and the logic of the international movement “plantations are not forests” (www.wrm.org.uy).

Conflict with Indigenous Populations