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.