Forests in Red: Anticapitalism and Community Forest Governance in Western India

Abstract

This thesis delineates the meaning of anticapitalist conservation by drawing on existing practices of community forest-governance in Western India. Mainstream conservation, intertwined with capitalist development, has failed to address the root causes of biodiversity loss. It has also led to unacceptable levels of socio-environmental justice that disproportionately affect some people in the global South, where many biodiversity hotspots lie. The ontological premises of this capitalist approach to conservation is now being widely rejected: No longer should nature be treated as completely separate from society and no longer should it be a goal to sell nature to save it. Stemming from that rejection, a few proposals for radical alternatives have been outlined. I contribute to those proposals by examining the practical implications of their ontologically-grounded rejection. In doing so I draw heavily on eco-socialist theory, building on its rich tradition of exposing the many ills and illusions of capitalist logic. At the same time, guided by the philosophy of critical-realism, I undertake an interdisciplinary investigation applying concepts from multiple theoretical traditions in a study that uses qualitative methods among the forest peoples of Western India. After synthesizing the critiques of mainstream conservation, I summarise the key theoretical tenets of alternatives as hitherto advanced. Building from this synthesis, I separately tackle two core tenets using empirical material from two forested regions in Maharashtra, India. In the first case of Koliwadi* and the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary, I examine the logic of nature/culture dualism underpinning fortress conservation through the concept of alienation, drawing on Karl Marx and Rahel Jaeggi. I show how separating people from nature produces multiple forms of alienation, some of which manifest at the subtle level of forest-dweller subjectivity. These subjective alienations are being exacerbated within neoliberalism, a political-economic logic overwhelming India. These newer forms of alienations in community-forest relations in turn give legitimacy to the ‘back-to-the-barriers’ approach, a stance privileged by dominant actors such as India’s forest bureaucracy. This perverse logic of intensifying separations between communities and nature I term ‘conservation-by-alienation’; I also briefly cover how Koliwadi’s villagers are attempting to resist it. In the second case of Korchi, I show that the mainstream tendency to treat nature primarily as a source of exchange-value can be countered by considering the more fundamental value relations forest-dwellers already have with surrounding forests. Here I draw on Ariel Salleh’s conceptualisation of metabolic-value: a value generated in relations of reciprocity and care that many indigenous and peasant communities have with local natures. In Korchi, using the analytical lens of value-relations, I argue that a constellation of direct use-value and metabolic-value relations keeps exchange-value pressures in check resulting in a healthy social metabolism, or what I term a fine balance. As a final step, I analyse Koliwadi and Korchi in relation to each other by applying Robert Fletcher’s Diverse Ecologies framework. I adapt his original framework using the Marxist notion of radical needs. A radical need is a need whose satisfaction leads to transformations in the dominant social order, capitalism in this case. I argue that in Korchi and Koliwadi one radical need is the need for formal recognition of the community’s rights to forest use and governance. Varying levels of satisfaction of this need produce varying levels of radical transformation in community-forest relations as evident in each case. This thesis is a thorough attempt to pay heed to the scholarly claim that radical conservation must reject capitalist value logics: it specifies the ways in which that rejection could occur by drawing inspiration from forest-dwellers struggling to reclaim their forests in the here and now. *A pseudonym for the village to maintain anonymity.

Date of Award	31 Oct 2024
Original language	English
Supervisor	Sergio Villamayor Tomas (Director) & James Angus Fraser (Director)