Forest Management and Conservation Regime

Forest conservation involves ensuring sustainability in use-priority areas, preservation in biodiversity-priority areas, and regulation of the conversion of forests to non-forests. But forests provide multiple benefits to multiple stakeholders at multiple scales, and hence trade-offs between these benefits result in tradeoffs between stakeholders. Forest governance therefore requires addressing questions relating to the use, preservation and conversion of forests while incorporating the interests of multiple stakeholders. This chapter describes how these questions were resolved under the statist forest governance regime that prevailed during the colonial and post-colonial epoch, till the passage of the Forest Rights Act, 2006. An overview of the basic legal framework is followed by a description of key variations, nuances, and shifts over time in each. An assessment of this governance regime is then presented in terms of the fairness of priorities chosen for forest management, including attention to customary rights and social justice, effectiveness, sustainability and transparency and accountability in functioning.