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Paper short abstract:

Paper critiques the developmental framing of environmental crisis & its dehistoricized understanding of TEK. By highlighting Adivasi dispossession and commercial agenda of colonial & postcolonial states, it calls for historically embedded solutions that integrate surviving Adivasi knowledge systems.

Paper long abstract:

Historically analyzing contemporary forest governance strategies in Ranchi, Gumla, and Dumka districts of Jharkhand, this paper critiques the developmental framing of the environmental crisis and its resolution through the revival of traditional-ecological-knowledge (TEK). By foregrounding the unjust alienation of Adivasis from their lands and forests by colonial policies like the Permanent Settlement Act (1793), which transformed the forests of Chotanagpur from Adivasi habitations into production landscapes, the paper emphasizes how Adivasi survival acts eroded TEK, now rendered irrelevant by dominant laws. The dispossession of Khuntkattidars and Bhuinhars by Zamindars undermined Adivasi perspectives of forests as extensions of their homes, requiring periodic renewal; reducing them to economic resources – which degraded over time and contributed to the contemporary environmental crisis.

Postcolonial forest governance perpetuated this extractive relationship by emphasizing the right to sale of Non-Timber-Forest-Produce (NTFP) as the primary and often only form of reparative justice. The production-centric framework rendered Adivasi cultural and ecological practices for habitat renewal irrelevant and the systemic exclusion and generational impoverishment of Adivasis amplified this erosion. Notional constitutional remedies like Forest Rights Act (2006) and PESA did little to address the loss of ecological knowledge tied to land alienation.

Thus, the paper critiques simplistic approaches to revival of TEK for forest conservation to mitigate climate crisis and argues for rebuilding indigenous knowledge-systems through institutional acknowledgment of the historial politico- epistemic oppression. It demands that a justice-focused framework be developed that reimagines forest-governance beyond a limited rights-based approach, integrating surviving Adivasi ethics, to respond to environmental crises.