The frog in the well was never blind: deconstructing empowerment in participatory forest governance

Participatory forest governance frameworks position rural women as key stakeholders whilst simultaneously undermining their ecological agency through institutional mechanisms that create what I term “ontological subduction.” This process allows women to maintain formal presence within governance structures whilst systematically eroding their decision-making authority through a body-mind disjuncture that instrumentalises their labour for forest management whilst excluding their ecological knowledge from institutional processes. Drawing on the Bengali metaphor of the frog in the well, I argue that structural containment rather than individual limitations shapes participation possibilities within what I conceptualise as an “expandable forest-governance ecosystem.” Within this framework, institutional interventions function analogously to invasive species that displace established women-forest relationships whilst securing compliance through participatory rhetoric. Examples from Indian forest contexts demonstrate how neoliberal development policies transform forest landscapes whilst maintaining participatory institutional arrangements that reproduce existing power relations through new institutional forms rather than achieving genuine empowerment. The argument concludes that meaningful transformation requires fundamental restructuring of governance systems to recognise women as integral ecological subjects whose agency remains inseparable from forest ecosystem health.