New
Partnerships for Forest Management in India: The Criteria for
Change
While
developing this new, innovative forest-management framework, it is
important to identify the institutional parameters on which it must
be based. Far into the future, partnerships of forest departments
and local institutions will remain asymmetrical. For over a
century, state Forest Departments (FDs) have wielded enormous power
and authority, with no con-comitant accountability to
forest-dependent villagers. For Joint Forest Management (JFM)
partnerships to succeed, they must be rooted in mutual acceptance
of clearly defined rights, responsibilities, and accountability by
both FDs and local institutions.
For the
forest bureaucracy, working with a large number of diverse and
scattered local institutions will mean a radical shift from
centralized, top-down planning and authority to developing a
capacity for decentralized decision making responsive to the
diversity of local needs and priorities. Prescriptive working plans
based on technical and revenue considerations will have to be
replaced by flexible planning sensitive to socioeconomic concerns
and processes for nurturing collaborative partnerships. This
implies challenging reforms in the forest departments' orientation,
training, internal structure, decision-making processes, and
priorities. Given the variation in the availability and
capabilities of local institutions in different regions, combined
with the institutional imperatives of their expected roles in JFM,
the FD as the larger institutional partner will also have to play
the role of guiding and nurturing the development of strong,
sustainable, and autonomous local institutions. For their part,
forest-dependent villagers will have to make a commitment to
strengthening or developing institutions with the capacity to
sustainably manage forest resources according to principles of
equity and accountability, where individual interest is curtailed
for the common benefit of all members.
Participatory
decision making and decentralized management are unfamiliar
concepts for forest departments. Few forest officers or field
staff, or even many of the NGOs involved in JFM, are familiar with
the basic principles upon which strong, stable, and democratic
local institutions must be founded and with the nurturing and
empowerment they are likely to require before being able to
undertake the resource management tasks expected of them. This is
particularly crucial in areas where there are no strong surviving
traditions of community organization to build upon. In such
situations, new traditions of collective resource management will
have to be cultivated and tested, a process likely to be slow and
to yield uneven results. Unfortunately, the poor performance of
externally imposed organizational structures on noncohesive,
diverse groups of villagers, which includes gram panchayats
covering anywhere from 1 to 22 villages in different states, has
eroded the credibility of "village institutions." It should be
emphasized that the generally inadequate performance of
government-sponsored local institutions in India has largely been
due to their not being founded on sound participatory and
democratic principles. Only through such a covenant can the
credibility and effectiveness of village institutions be
re-established.
Madhu
Sarin, From Conflict to Collaboration, op.
cit.