Ajit Menon

Impacts of Public Policies and Farmer Preferences on Agroforestry Practices in Kerala, India

Agroforestry systems are fundamental features of the rural landscape of the Indian state of Kerala. Yet these mixed species systems are increasingly being replaced by monocultures. This paper explores how public policies on land tenure, agriculture, forestry and tree growing on private lands have interacted with farmer preferences in shaping land use dynamics and agroforestry practices. It argues that not only is there no specific policy for agroforestry in Kerala, but also that the existing sectoral policies of land tenure, agriculture, and forestry contributed to promoting plantation crops, even among marginal farmers. Forest policies, which impose restrictions on timber extraction from farmers’ fields under the garb of protecting natural forests, have often acted as a disincentive to maintaining tree-based mixed production systems on farmlands. The paper argues that public policies interact with farmers’ preferences in determining land use practices.

Transboundary Dialogues and the ‘Politics of Scale’ in Palk Bay Fisheries: Brothers at Sea?

This article examines how the politics of scale affect a process of dialogue led by civil society actors over fishing conflicts taking place at the local level in South Asia. The location is the Palk Bay and the fishers are Tamils from India and Sri Lanka. An agreement over fishing rights reached between these fishers in August 2010 remains largely unimplemented, but takes centre stage for this article, which examines the negotiation processes in terms of politics of scale and highlights the various difficulties encountered. Major pitfalls in a dialogue of this sort are the failure to recognise diversity within the population(s) involved and lack of recognition of the linkages of this population with other actors at different scales or levels. In a transboundary context, national and regional identities at times override local identity and interests, thereby making locally constructed solutions difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

Colonial constructions of 'agrarian fields' and 'forests' in the Kolli Hills

Forest histories have more often than not remained aloof from more broad-based economic histories of agrarian communities. As a result, narratives of the forest economy have focused almost entirely on the process offorest settlement. This article focuses on regional processes of territorialisation associated with revenue and forest settlement in the context of the Kolli Hills. It is argued that the colonial states usurpation of land created a false dichotomy betweenforests and fields that did not exist locally. Hence, the impact of colonialism on forest- dependent communities is understood within the wider purview of the land question in the Kolli Hills, both in the past and the present.

Competing Visions: Domestic Forests, Politics and Forest Policy in the Central Western Ghats of South India

Rural people in developing countries including India continue to access a number of types of ‘forests’ to meet specific needs such as fuelwood, fodder, food, non-timber forest produce and timber for both subsistence and income generation. While a plethora of terms exist to describe the types of forests that rural people use—such as farm forests, social forests, community forests and small-scale forests—the expression domestic forest has recently been proposed. Domestic forest is a term aimed at capturing the diversity of forests transformed and managed by rural communities and a way to introduce a new scientific domain that recognises that production and conservation can be reconciled and that local communities can be effective managers. This paper argues in the context of the central Western Ghats of south India that while the domestic forest concept is a useful umbrella term to capture the diversity of forests used by rural people, these domestic forests are often not autonomous local forests but sites of contestation between local actors and the state forest bureaucracy. Hence, a paradigm shift within the forest bureaucracy will only occur if the scientific forestry community questions its own normative views on forest management and sees forest policy as a means to recognise local claims and support existing practices of forest dependent communities.

Fluid territories: Rethinking state territorialisation in Palk Bay, South Asia

ABSTRACT The study objective was to gain a better understanding of the transboundary fishing conflict between Indian trawl fishers and Sri Lankan small-scale fishers in Palk Bay using a relational approach to territoriality. The authors employed different ethnographic methods, including open, structured, and semi-structured interviews, and performed a media analysis in order to understand the everyday practices of Indian trawl fishers within the wider geopolitical context of a 30-year war in neighbouring Sri Lanka. The relational approach moves away from seeing cross-border fishing merely as an act of counter-territorialisation. The results revealed that the cross-border fishing underlying the crisis has largely resulted from a complex network of changing relationships between on the one hand Indian trawl fishers and India, and on the other hand Sri Lankan state agencies and Sri Lankan fishers, resulting in a porous international maritime boundary. The authors conclude that this in turn has resulted in a fluid international maritime boundary line.

Denuded forests, wooded estates: Statemaking in a Janmam area of Gudalur, Tamil Nadu

Small farmers have been blamed for forest degradation in O’Valley, Gudalur. The state’s response to this perceived forest degradation in the post-colonial period has been to increasingly environmentalise forest policy and law through extending its territorial control over the ‘forested commons’, consequently labelling farmers as encroachers. This article argues that the state was in fact very much implicated, along with the Nilambur Kovilagam janmi (landlord), in the transformation of the forested landscape into a plantation economy so as to increase its revenue. It also highlights the contradictions in the post-colonial state’s environmentalisation of policy, the impact of this environmentalisation on small farmers and how small farmers, along with larger estate owners, resisted mostly through legal recourse the state’s efforts to reclaim undeveloped forest land. By doing so, the article highlights the contested meanings often ascribed to the forested commons that underlie conflicts over resources.