‘Go-No-Go’: Anticommons and Inter-ministerial conflict in India’s Forest and Mineral Governance

India’s forests, particularly in coal and other mineral-bearing regions, have been at the centre of many social and environmental conflicts. Such conflicts will likely remain salient over the next decade as India appears to be moving towards greater use of coal instead of transitioning away from it. The current governance architecture in mineral-bearing forested areas is characterized by fragmentation of rights across different stakeholders and a pluralistic institutional regime – a situation often characterized as ‘anticommons.’ ‘Anticommons’ lead to the resource getting gridlocked and underused. The Indian government undertook a critical and ambitious policy design exercise – the ‘Go-No-Go’ or Inviolate Forest Policy (IFP) policy – to address the resource dilemmas by ‘objectively’ demarcating forests for mining and conservation. This paper traces the conflict around the policy formulation as it manifested in the corridors and ministries of the government. We use a novel data source of government records of formal policy deliberations – obtained through India’s transparency law, Right to Information (RTI) – supported by conversations with senior bureaucrats, policymakers, and expert observers. We find that the quest for ‘objective’ demarcation of ‘pristine’ forests for conservation was marked by inter-ministerial conflict, laden with asymmetric power balances and involving the careful deployment of discursive frames and tactical maneuvers. We argue that the multiplicity of use-values that get valued differently a) by different individuals/groups of individuals and b) at different scales inscribe the possibility of conflict at the heart of any attempt to resolve anticommons, as can be seen in the IFP. In the process, we expose the problems in prioritizing amongst competing resource-uses, using ‘efficiency’-based approaches. Further, our analysis presents an implicit critique of the monolithic understanding of the State in the supply of property rights.