Presentation short abstract

The paper seeks to understand the underlying social, political and economic factors driving local conservation resistance.

Presentation long abstract

The paper seeks to understand the underlying social, political and economic factors driving local conservation resistance. The study is in the context of mass protests in the southern State of Kerala, India, against the Western Ghats Ecological Expert Panel reports and a second High-Level Working Group that recommended conservation of the Western Ghats. The methods used are a content analysis of the Gadgil and Kasturirangan reports, a discourse analysis of 386 newspaper articles on the conflict, open-ended qualitative interviews and focused group discussions in the area with a high number of instances of conflict. We found that the Western Ghats is not just a mountain range to be conserved but a political construct that is imagined differently by actors operating at different scales. With technology, the State and the expert committees have tried to render this landscape legible through maps, databases, and satellite images. This legibility and its inevitable reductions poorly fit the dynamics of the local social reality and inevitably opened the door to conflict. The current push for conservation is set against the backdrop of a long history of state coercive evictions and a plantation economy that has resulted in drastic land-use change. Hence, conservation is often about control over space and resources and the meanings we attach to the resource we seek to conserve.

Presentation short abstract

While recent forest reforms in the DRC promised to address historical exclusions, new forms of territorialization have formed around community and carbon forestry. In Mai-Ndombe, these reshape politics of access and representation as actors struggle to benefit from emerging ecological land uses.

Presentation long abstract

Since the turn of the 21st century, forest governance in Central Africa has been increasingly shaped by a neoliberal shift towards decentralization, market-based conservation, and carbon finance. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a reform of the forest code in 2002 laid the basis for community forestry and REDD+. It opened a way to recognize the customary rights of historically marginalized populations over forested lands and introduced new mechanisms to generate revenue for their conservation efforts. Yet, although these policies are presented as win–win solutions that could reconcile social and ecological objectives, it remains unclear how they articulate with each other in practice. Their implementation raises two central questions for political ecology: To what extent do current community conservation and carbon projects transform power relations in forested territories? How do they reconfigure access to land and revenues?

To address these questions, we draw on ethnographic research conducted in Bolobo Territory (Mai-Ndombe Province), including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and policy documents analysis. Our case study shows how local and international conservation NGOs have positioned themselves as key territorial intermediaries, benefiting from their privileged access to financial resources and technical expertise. We highlight the ways through which they have institutionalized community-based forest management and thereby reconfigured local land uses towards conservation. Finally, by examining the effects of these changes on access to land and its revenues across different groups of actors, we show how these new forms of territorialization, legitimized by “community” and environmental discourses, can reproduce earlier patterns of exclusion.

Presentation short abstract

How do satellite-based remote sensing capacities afford the state the possibility for environmental performativity without undertaking substantive, and often economically hurtful, actions needed to solve problems and how the state, in turn, reconfigures technologies for these everyday performances?

Presentation long abstract

State uses of spatial technologies are often a strategy to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental policies, though as critical scholars argue, such technologies can reduce and oversimplify socio-ecological complexities. As environmental challenges continue to worsen and states negotiate their role in balancing contrasting environmental and developmental agendas, it is useful to ask how and in what ways states turn to spatial technologies to perform governance. Combining literature in environmental governance and science and technology studies, we ask how, and in what ways, spatial technologies afford the state the possibility for environmental performativity without undertaking substantive, and often economically hurtful, actions needed to solve problems and how the state, in turn, reconfigures technologies for these everyday performances.

We focus on Indian forest governance, particularly the history of Forest Survey of India (FSI) in developing and using satellite-based remote sensing capacities for forest measurement, to answer these questions. Using key informant interviews and archival and documentary research, we look into the FSI and the State of Forest Report it publishes biennially. We analyze how decisions around methodologies were made, how different stakeholders engaged these decisions, and how decisions were shaped by domestic and international negotiations. In examining this interaction of technology and the performative environmental state, we base our analysis on three interacting factors –a) domestic political economic pressures, manifested through developmental politics, judicial activism, or social movements, b) international politics of climate change, and c) the evolution of remote sensing capabilities of the Indian state.

Presentation short abstract

Bringing together sociotechnical regime and political forest approaches, this paper examines how material legacies, ecological disturbances, economic incentives and state instruments shape the territorialisation of three competing regimes of forest regeneration in Dordogne, France.

Presentation long abstract

Forest regeneration has become a terrain of struggle in climate change adaptation policies, as forests are simultaneously mobilised for adaptation and affected by ecological disruption. In France, state support for the plantation of fast-growing, genetically selected species reflects a techno-centric orientation seeking to reduce uncertainty while sustaining timber demand. It collides with approaches advocating natural regeneration, diversification and “living forests”, making regeneration an entry point into the contentious coproduction of forests. In Dordogne, these tensions are shaped by territorial histories and forest materialities: the decline of chestnut, both a biophysical process and a political narrative, legitimises the expansion of the neighbouring Landes-style plantation regime (pine monocultures), while local forests remain characterised by mixed stands and chestnut coppice. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, this paper examines the competing territorialisations of three sociotechnical regimes of forest regeneration, understood as dynamic configurations of actors, technologies, artefacts, practices, values and institutional and economic logics: (1) the plantation regime, supported by state subsidies, carbon finance and adaptation narratives; (2) alternative configurations opposing clear-cuts and monocultures; and (3) a local chestnut regime, often devalued yet functioning as a site of hybridisation. Bringing together sociotechnical regime and political forest approaches, the paper analyses how material legacies and infrastructures, ecological disturbances, economic incentives and state instruments enable or constrain these configurations, shaping their capacity to materialise in place. It shows that forest regeneration is a process through which political, ecological and territorial orders are reconfigured, offering an insight into how political forests take shape in a global North setting.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how the historically autonomous tribal region of Dang, Gujarat, is reshaped under the Forest Rights Act (2006). It shows how evidence, mapping, and long wait produce legal subjects and change relations with the forest, while creating friction as older sense of being persists.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the transformation of forest relations in Dang district, Gujarat, following the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006. Historically governed by Bhil kings and shaped through affective, embodied interactions with the forest, the Dangi landscape was a space of autonomy, movement, and relational belonging. Colonial and post-colonial interventions disrupted these dynamics, imposing legal-bureaucratic control. While framed as corrective, the FRA paradoxically reproduces many of the logics it seeks to undo.

Based on qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted between Sept-Dec 2024, the paper draws on Peluso and Vandergeest to approach the Dangi forest as a political forest—a space produced through projects of governance that determine who belongs, who controls land, and what counts as legitimate practice. In the Dang, under the FRA, this production unfolds through evidentiary requirements, documentary inscription, cartographic techniques, and the prolonged waiting embedded in the process. Together, these practices work to (re)territorialise the landscape by transforming lived, relational spaces of belonging into administratively bounded units of governance, while simultaneously making the “forest-dweller” into a legally recognizable and governable subject. Yet this process is not seamless. The interplay of regulation and everyday life generates frictional co-production, reviving alternative claims to belonging and sovereignty.

By tracing how documentation, mapping, and waiting shape everyday life in Dang, the paper demonstrates that FRA 2006 restructures forest relations through a dynamic interplay of recognition and regulation. In doing so, it offers a grounded contribution to debates on political forests, Indigenous sovereignty, and postcolonial state formation.

Presentation short abstract

The paper explores how the contested Kaihlam Wildlife Sanctuary reveals tensions between state-led conservation and Indigenous resistance, exposing the limits of legibility.

Presentation long abstract

The paper examines the contested declaration of Kaihlam Wildlife Sanctuary (KWS) in Manipur, India, as a site where state-led conservation meets Indigenous resistance. Drawing on James C. Scott’s concept of legibility and Michel Foucault's governmentality, I interrogate how the state’s attempt to render forests governable through legal and bureaucratic technologies—maps, laws, and notifications—produces not governance but friction. While the sanctuary exists on paper, it remains materially and politically unrealised on the ground, revealing the limits of state legibility. The paper traces how colonial and postcolonial forest laws have continually redefined tribal land relations, yet Indigenous institutions of chieftainship continue to resist incorporation into state frameworks. By situating this failure of "environmentality" (Agrawal 2005) within the broader politics of recognition and resource control, the study argues that illegibility itself becomes a form of resistance, where local communities sustain alternative regimes of visibility and belonging that defy the state’s cartographic imagination.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the porous boundary between “political” and “lived” forests in Jharkhand. Ethnography in Dumka and West Singhbhum shows how contested boundaries, shifting claims, and negotiations with the state transform forests into property, managed landscapes, and rigid territorial zones.

Presentation long abstract

Scholarship has often distinguished between “political forests” and “lived forests” (Peluso and Vandergeest, 2020) in framing forests as both discursive and ecological spaces. This paper unsettles that separation by examining their porosity through historically-informed ethnographic research in Dumka and West Singhbhum in Jharkhand, India. Colonial interventions and subsequent zoning produced contested forest boundaries, with legal categories frequently diverging from their enforceability on the ground - an outcome shaped by everyday negotiations among forest-dependent communities, interests of the timber markets, and the operation of the many state(s). These processes have in turn reshaped the materiality of the forests itself, reinforcing and constraining subsequent processes.

Contemporary claims under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) must be read within this trajectory. While significant, following Li (2011), we argue that claims-making under the FRA generates new forms of exclusive rights, derived partly from bureaucratic languages and governmental logics — even as they contest exclusions embedded in conservation regimes. This marks a shift from earlier, flexible and overlapping forms of access grounded in kinship, customary authority, and social relations; to increasingly rigid definitions of land as private property and forests as resources.

These processes culminate in the consolidation of forests as property, as managed landscapes, and as territorially demarcated zones, rather than interdependent ecosystems, with irreversible impacts on the material ‘nature’ of forests (Tsing, 2019). The paper thus links political and lived forests within the FRA discourse, by tracing contested regimes of regulation, force, market, and legitimation that operate therein, continuously reshaping both, discursively and materially.

Presentation short abstract

India’s political forests have been shaped historically by shifts in ideology, territoriality for extraction and conservation, and regimes of possession. The hitherto stable hegemonic regime of fortress conservation is being disrupted today by unruly natures and emerging discourses of coexistence.

Presentation long abstract

Conservation regimes that seek to protect charismatic species in pristine ecosystems mask an inescapable truth: strictly protected areas are socionatures actively produced through deception, discourse and physical manipulation of biota. Theorising India’s protected areas as terra natura, this paper demonstrates the interplay of ideology, territoriality, and regimes of possession in producing such landscapes. We critically analyse the history of forest management, law, conservation policy, and elite mobilisations vis-à-vis charismatic species to discern five phases and two ambitions of territoriality in India. In each phase, the knowledges and practices of forest communities came into conflict with the state’s imagination and uses of political forests. However, the violence, dispossession and social justice outcomes varied in each phase with shifts in ideology, ambitions of territoriality (extraction and/or conservation) and regimes of property and possession. We focus especially on the most recent phases (1972-2006 and 2006-2025) when (a) terra natura is produced through discursive and material practices that spectacularise, invisibilise and sanitise; (b) the ideology of fortress conservation achieves hegemonic status through narratives of crisis, extinction, and nationalism; and (c) counter-hegemonic challenges of forest dwellers’ resistance and safeguard legislations are thwarted in practice. We contend that the contemporary moment is an inflection point, where the hegemony of fortress conservation is being disrupted materially by unruly natures, and discursively by non-state conservation actors advocating coexistence of humans with non-human and more-than-human nature.

Presentation short abstract

A reconsideration of the politics of land and subject formation among descendants of refugee-settlers in the Andaman Islands, India, that shows how territorial regimes and state ownership of forested landscapes become hegemonic through everyday politics in the Indian nation-state.

Presentation long abstract

A crucial element of the ‘political’ in political forests is how territorial regimes defining boundaries of forest and agrarian land turn hegemonic. The case of descendants of agrarian refugee-settlers inhabiting the farm-forest frontier in North Andaman in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a territory of India in the Bay of Bengal, shows how territorial regimes gain popular legitimacy over time.

Refugee-settlers, who arrived in this region in the 1950s, and agrarian migrants who arrived here from the 1980s onwards, both lower caste Hindu migrants from present-day Bangladesh, have made North Andaman home. People from both groups made agricultural clearings in the northern forests, and descendants of both groups now compete to gain secure tenure for this land.

Descendants of refugee-settlers claim primary right to cultivated land in the forest by claiming they belong to North Andaman. Descendants of settlers’ claims though are not only moral and draw their legitimation from historical and ongoing processes of subject formation. After decades of contesting state territorial boundaries and schemes, when they now articulate their claims, they use terms that the state uses to define the landscape, and accept state-imposed boundaries of forest land.

Based in ethnographic fieldwork, my analysis of the history of subject formation amongst descendants of settlers as well as of the politics of land in North Andaman (Li 2007; Subramanian 2009; Hall, Hirsch and Li 2011), shows how state ownership of forested landscapes has become hegemonic in this region and how postcolonial territorial regimes are strengthened through everyday politics.

Presentation short abstract

This paper traces the shifting meanings of the Singalila National Park (SNP) in the Eastern Himalayas from the colonial to the contemporary times through the entanglement of humans, non-humans, conservation of red panda, identity assertion and accumulation.

Presentation long abstract

The red panda (Ailurus fulgens) is a rare and magnificent species that has elicited immense conservation interest. It is also a mascot of regional identity in the Eastern Himalayas. This paper discusses the political, economic and cultural contestations around the red panda conservation in the Singalila National Park (SNP) in the Darjeeling Hills. The rewilding of the species by the Darjeeling Zoo in 2003 turned the SNP, once accessed by only pastoralists, trekkers and naturalists, into a tourism hotspot. The majestic view of Mount Kanchenjunga further adds to the attraction of visitors to the park. The erstwhile rugged trekking route is now easily approachable by vehicles and marked by the mushrooming of commercial homestays and cross-border mobility. Unlike many other national parks in the country that started off as game reserves in colonial times, SNP is one of the recent additions to the list of protected areas in India (Wildlife sanctuary in 1986 and national park in 1992). While the territorialisation of the SNP embodies post-colonial conservation enthusiasm and exclusion of the rural livelihood, it has also concomitantly fuelled new notions of property, tourism economy and regional identity politics in the Himalayan highland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around the SNP between 2017 and 2020 and archival research, this paper traces the shifting meanings of the SNP from the colonial past to the contemporary times through the entanglement of human, non-humans, and conservation politics in making SNP a site for conservation, identity assertion and accumulation.