Paper short abstract:

This paper examines shifts in the management and use of a single grazing pasture in Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh. It focuses on conflicts between user groups and the changing ways that local norms of use are socially justified through discourses of development and of Indian nationalism.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of ten years this paper examines shifts in the management and use of a single grazing pasture in Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh. Access to grazing resources by the nomadic Gaddi shepherds and Gujjar buffalo herders are supposedly governed by a complex system of official rights, permits and quotas. Where previous analysis has tended to suggest cooperation between nomadic graziers in the face of oppressive state regulation, the focus of this paper is on conflicts between different users and the changing ways that local norms of access and exclusion may be socially justified through discourses of Indian nationalism and new understandings of the relationship between citizens, state and market in post-liberalisation India. Outlining the interaction of different users and the changing ways in which they make and justify their claims reveals a range of access and use arrangements. Doing so brings into question traditional ideas of community and demonstrates a more fluid basis for the workings of common property resource management institutions.