|
|
Politics, Conservation and Development
CONFLICTING CLAIMS | The GHNP | POLITICS and DEVELOPMENT | REFERENCES
April 2002: The basic centrality of politics to the outcomes of conservation initiatives comes through repeatedly in studies of conflicts over natural resources (Guha 1989, Peluso, 1993, Neumann 1992). Many of these studies however, document a harsh state, bent on the exploitation of nature and labor. And yet, the notion of the omnipotent state, capable of exerting its will over disparate, fragmented communities, has come under serious attack (Yang 1992, Saberwal 1999, Sivaramakrishnan 2000, see also Chhatre this volume). An emerging literature is increasingly keen on providing more nuanced descriptions of community and the means by which access to resources is negotiated or contested within and beyond the community (Agrawal 1999, Jeffery and Sundar 1999, Sivaramakrishnan 2000).
The problem we pose in this preliminary and highly speculative argument is that in this move towards the local, toward obtaining a better understanding of how power plays out within communities, there has been an unfortunate reduction in focus on the larger politics of state formation, in particular the question of electoral politics that keeps a post-colonial government in power, and development politics, that today keeps the state financially solvent. Development has often been left out of the conservation picture in the expectation that exploitative development and exclusionary conservation are related phenomenon, with similar roots, but that these are ultimately separate issues. Joint Forest Management, thus, gets discussed within the context of questions of livelihoods and more equitable access to forests, rather than within the larger context of development policy and how that relates to conservation. Thus, for example, we focus on issues of gender within Orissa?s JFM experience, but rarely locate JFM within a larger discussion on Orissa?s development orientation.
We now take an analytical look at the GHNP material that we have outlined above. We have located this analysis within the potentially contradictory impulses of conservation and development, set within the framework of a politically powerful electorate. Two seemingly unrelated events lie at the heart of the GHNP story. Both are associated with the final settlement of the national park. Yet the two events have led to dramatically different outcomes. The first event involved the Himachal Pradesh government issuing the final notification for the GHNP, via a settlement that would deny people access to park resources. Importantly, this notification came fifteen years after the intent to notify the park was first announced. As with almost every other protected area in the country, the GHNP was a National Park only on paper, meeting none of the legal requirements that all human consumptive use of resources within the park be eliminated before the park could be notified. With over 500 protected areas in the country at the time, only a handful had been finally notified, testimony to the fact that state governments were willing to go along with a conservationist agenda, but only up to a point. No state government was willing to incur the political costs of eliminating human access to these areas. That the Himachal government should chose to finally extinguish all rights within the national park flies in the face of all electoral logic.
But the second event provides a clue as to the nature of the calculus of the government in finally notifying the national park. In 1999, at the time of this settlement, a portion of the Jeeva Nallah was deleted from the original boundaries of the park, ostensibly on grounds of allowing the villagers of Kundar and Majhan villages to remain within the park, rather than be forced to move out following the settlement. It was a specious logic given that in other instances, in which villagers refused to move out of the park, such as Shakti and Maror, the relevant area had been carved out of the National Park and downgraded to the status of a Wildlife Sanctuary. The decision to entirely delete the area from the national park, instead of merely reducing the level of protection, appears to have been necessitated by the need to accommodate the building activity associated with the second phase of the Parvati Project.
Despite the seemingly contradictory nature of these two events ? the protection of wildlife on the one hand, the enabling of environmentally destructive development on the other -- they are closely connected. We argue here that environmental politics are crucially entwined with a certain kind of development discourse. It is a discourse that enables a state/central government to appeal to a larger Himachali identity ? in this case, centered around the creation of a new Himachal, the power-house of the country. Hydel projects have been conceptualized and implemented for many decades, but the current government has given a huge impetus to establishing Himachal Pradesh as a major source of hydel-power in the coming decades. Over 300 projects are proposed in the state, and are up for grabs for the private sector ? a dam on every stream. Big development may get part of its legitimacy through the process of identity creation ? i.e. through a process by which Himachali?s themselves associated their state with hydel power. But such projects are also of importance because of the possibilities of diverting funds towards building financial and political empires. The haste with which the settlement process was carried out, including the machinations around the deletion of a part of the Jeeva Nallah, appears directly linked to this developmentalist rather than conservationist agenda of the state government.
This brings us to a second sphere of conservation politics. As a result of the final notification of the park, people were no longer allowed to access park resources. And yet, now for two years running, people have used the park pretty much as they please. They?ve grazed their animals in the park, they?ve continued to harvest medicinal herbs and they?ve continued to take their deities into the park. They can do this because the praxis of conservation is a long way from the rhetoric. Local politicians call up the DC or the park director and direct them to permit villagers access to park resources (Baviskar in press). This, the MLA and MP constituency, constitutes the crucial arena within which the politics of conservation are played out. It is at this level that the actual implementation of conservation policy takes place, and where the flexible arm of the law comes into its own. And it is the knowledge of this flexibility that provides the necessary re-assurance to the government that a final notification need not in fact force the government to incur significant electoral losses.
It is the interaction of these two spheres of politics that ultimately shapes both the direction of development, as well as the practice of conservation in the Kullu Valley. As can be seen in the GHNP case, the state may espouse a conservation ideology, while pursuing a developmentalist agenda that has potential for great environmental damage. Significantly, the articulation of a conservationist agenda provides legitimacy with international funding agencies as well as with an urban middle class with an interest in conserving wildlife. Interventions at the level of the political constituency ultimately work to minimize any electoral costs the government may have to bear through an enforcement of unpopular policies. And it is only because the director of the GHNP, Sanjeeva Pandey, has caused a fuss, insisting that he will enforce all restrictions, that much notice has been taken of the settlement at all. Eventually, when push has come to shove, Pandey himself has had to back down, or risk being replaced with someone more pliable.
With the growing availability of big funding for conservation projects, there is a newfound reason for state governments to adopt a language that is more in line with international expectations. Thus, eco-development has emerged in recent years as a panacea for dealing with continuing conflicts between people and protected areas ? the rationale being that through the development of alternative sources of income, local dependencies on park resources will be drastically lowered. Human development is seen as going hand in hand with the effective conservation of biological diversity. But development is a complex process, and the GHNP experience with eco-development serves to reinforce that idea. As with any government project involving large-scale expenditure of money, corruption during the first five years of the process was rampant. More importantly, however, the department appeared to have little conception of just how to go about bringing development to the people. While a certain expenditure of money took place in the construction of civil works, and items such as handlooms, television sets and pressure cookers handed out to the villagers, none of this was linked in any way to an impending curtailment of villager access to park resources. Ultimately, close to 70 % of the money budgeted for eco-development was spent on civil works of a general nature, with few inputs into activities or initiatives that would enhance a villager?s capacity to reduce his or her dependence upon herb collections as a form of livelihood. People took what came their way via eco-development, but without relinquishing in thought or in deed, any right to grazing, fuelwood or herb collection in the park (Baviskar in press).
Politics once more is omnipresent. Even as the government attempted to gain the trust of the community, through the use of Entry Point Activities, they chose to deal with the most powerful people in the community ? members of the devta committee. By definition, these committees are comprised of high caste men, and hence are clearly not representative of the varied interests within a village (Baviskar in press). For the most part, these committees seemed to function as rubber-stamps, enabling the departmental activities that took place during the eco-development exercise. Temple repairs were commonly sanctioned by the forest department, clearly in response to the demands of the devta committees. But the department did all that was demanded of it by the World Bank - working with a local NGO - SAVE, appearing to work with village level institutions - Devta committees and Village Eco-Development Committees -- and spending money according to microplans that had been developed on the basis of villager participation.
For a government to function it needs legitimacy for its actions from a wide range of constituencies. Large scale development projects provide a legitimacy that is linked both to the creation of jobs and by appealing to a larger Himachali identity, centered around defining the state in terms of the future power-house of the country. Projects such as eco-development, when de-linked from curtailed access to the Park, potentially provide legitimacy with a village elite, while enabling the smooth flow of funds from the World Bank to the state coffers. And the elasticity of the law, which enables people to enter the Park despite existing restrictions, works to minimize any potentially negative electoral fall-out of the final settlement of rights within the area.
There is a final political sphere that bears examining. The scientific discourse on human impacts on the environment is part of an over-arching context within which conservation debates take place. It is political in so far as an identifiable constituency has attempted to push through the idea that all human activities are inimical to the conservation of biodiversity. Such a relationship is clearly not axiomatic. And yet, even in the face of evidence pointing to the contrary, there is little attempt on part of the mainstream conservation lobby to engage with alternative models regarding the impacts of humans on the landscape. This conservation lobby uses its scientific expertise to press for the closure of areas to human presence. The eco-development project that has a stated interest in reducing human dependence on the Park, is clearly influenced by the dominant conservation rhetoric generated both within India and within the international conservation community. The rhetoric, and the scientific community, serves as an additional pressure point, one that may be used to push for a permanent closure of the park to all human activities.
This pressure comes into its own most forcefully when there is a committed forest officer in charge of a national park such as the GHNP. Sanjeeva Pandey is a conservationist in body, spirit and in mind. It is likely that outside of the village communities in the area, Pandey is the best-informed person about the park. He knows his terrain. And he has a dream that one day, human pressures will be absent from his park. He works hard to fulfill this dream, instructing his subordinates to prevent anyone from entering the Park, confiscating equipment and goods, touring villages in the hope of convincing people that they should stay out of the Park, and attempting to provide them with alternative forms of employment that will reduce their ultimate dependence on Park resources. And Sanjeeva Pandey uses the science at his disposal ? that of the WII ? to buttress his arguments against the continued use of the Park.
When local residents use their electoral clout with MP Maheshwar Singh to force Sanjeeva Pandey to back down, this is merely another intersection of two spheres of politics - local politics on the one hand, science as politics on the other. Given thus, the centrality of politics to Indian conservation, there are many amongst those concerned about Indian biodiversity who call for a more insistent engagement with the political process, an engagement that needs to occur at each of these intersecting levels ? local, state and national. Debates amongst many urban conservationists active in various parts of the country take place on a regular basis. A fora that has managed to sustain dialogue between groups belonging to different conservation camps is the annual consultations that have been organized by the conservation NGO Kalpavriksh over the past five years. It is a fora attended by bureaucrats, social activists and exclusionary conservationists, in an atmosphere that is for the most part conducive to a real exchange of ideas. Such exchanges are useful in prodding the centre towards adopting legislation and policies that are more inclusive.
There is simultaneously the call for greater dialogue with people directly affected by conservation policies ? and an argument that has been put forward by many for the need to build bridges with local communities. Such bridges are seen as being necessary both to secure the support of these people for conservation initiatives, as well as to provide the electoral and political bulwark against destructive activities such as mining and the building of dams. While greater local involvement may indeed have relevance in the context of a given conservation initiative ? such as, for example, better management of the GHNP situation, it is unlikely to be of great relevance in the context of the larger development agenda that is being set by the state, if only because of an imbalance with regard to electoral pressure in a single political constituency on the one hand and the over-arching developmentalist agenda of the state on the other.
For political pressure to work in the interests of the environment, particularly when confronting big development, there is a need for mobilization over a much larger scale ? in this case, across the state (in the geographic sense of the term). Within Himachal Pradesh there are the beginnings of such mobilization. A Palampur based NGO, Navrachna, is working towards the establishment of a state-wide network of individuals and organizations involved with a variety of issues related to conservation and development. The initiative is entirely political in its orientation, with an explicit interest in exploring the links between environment and development, rather than dealing individually with either or both issues. The work of Ekta-Parishad in Madhya Pradesh and recently in Bihar is similarly broad-based in its approach, focusing on land reform, access to forest resources and a greater say in setting development priorities, rather than merely focusing on more restricted issues associated with conservation.
Vasant Saberwal and Ashwini Chhatre
April 2002
CONFLICTING CLAIMS | The GHNP | POLITICS and DEVELOPMENT | REFERENCES