Collective Action for Natural Resource Management in the Western Ghats. Case Study of Chennayanakote Village, Kodagu District

Community forestry and participatory forest policies such as Joint Forest Management and Ecodevelopment in India have been largely studied. This paper proposes to investigate the same public policies not only with a deep attention to the complexity of forest practices and representations but also from a particular theoretical lense: the strategic approches developed by the Sociology of Organized Action and the Strategic Environmental Management Analysis. An in-depth study of two types of management committees called Ecodevelopement Committee (EDC) and Village Forest Committee (VFC), in a forest-fringe village of Kodagu district in the Western Ghats, was carried out to understand how the ruling principles of such participative natural resources management schemes were translated into field realities. The application of the theoretical frameworks mentioned enabled us to outline the effective systems of action developed inside and around both committees. A first assessment of the actions undertaken in Kodagu revealed the relative weak contribution of those participatory schemes to the sustainable management of forest resources. Then the analysis we draw from local governance aspects questions the extent of citizen power in the decision-making process over natural resources management. We described the type of participatory forest management promoted by the Forest Department as an ‘accepted'participation in which villagers are not really involved in the decision-making process and in which their role is limited to provide information to the Forest Department and their ‘participation' limited to a physical one (labour). Local realities call for the necessity to impulse another system of forest management that could integrate multiple of actors with multiple interests and who all pursue divergent and sometimes contradictory objectives.