Local development and conservation in forest policy in India and Nepal: putting community management programmes in the Himalayas into perspective
presented by Mauve Létang
PhD student at Lettres Sorbonne Université - Laboratoire Médiations
and CEH associate member
The viva will take place on Wednesday 2 June 2020 at 2pm, online. Please let me know beforehand by email (mauveletang1@gmail.com) if you intend to attend the viva so that I can send you the zoom link.
Members of the panel:
Sarah BENABOU – Researcher, IRD - IFP
Pierre DÉRIOZ – University lecturer, Université d’Avignon (rapporteur)
Frédéric LANDY – Professor, Université Paris Nanterre (supervisor)
Fabien LOCHER – Researcher, CNRS - EHESS
Isabelle SACAREAU – Professor, Université de Bordeaux
Olivier SEVIN – Professor, Sorbonne Université (supervisor)
Joëlle SMADJA – Senior researcher, CNRS - CEH (rapporteure)
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the Himalayan forest policies of two distinct states, India and Nepal. Since the 1990s, the community, as a resource-using socio-spatial entity, has received renewed attention in Himalayan forestry programmes. However, in proposing a genealogy of modern state power in forests, this research shows that the concept of community-based management needs to be integrated into a broader and longer reconfiguration of state intervention in forests. Today, community management mobilisation and practices are generally driven by key intermediaries: community activists and social workers. The corollary of these intermediaries is that, in both Annapurna (Nepal) and Uttarakhand (India), they mobilise the lexicon of the common as a political horizon.
It is therefore the way in which these actors position themselves between the state and forest users which this research focuses on in order to analyse government rationalities based on community forest management in the Himalayas. Consequently, this thesis is part of the critical field of study of the commons and analyses the discourses and practices of the⋅commons of community activists and social workers in their work to implement forest policies through the distribution of public programmes. This thesis therefore proposes an analysis of the state in everyday life, taking into account the actual practices of state agents - its elected officials, its civil servants, its private intermediaries - allowing it to operate its redeployment at local level, within its administrations and its forest territories.
Keywords : Himalayas; state; community-based management; forest property; environmental laws and policies