The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political Economy

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The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political EconomyAuthor(s): Paul RobbinsSource: Economic Geography, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 126-144Published by: Clark UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/144550 .

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The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political Economy*

Paul Robbins Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210

probbins@geography. ohio-state. edu

Abstract: Study of local environmental knowledge has led to a general critique of state epistemology, positing a controlling, official knowledge that crushes competing accounts of nature. Skeptical of that claim, in this paper I assess the differences between state and local knowledge empirically, using a case study of the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India, to explore the way knowledge varies across class, caste, gender, and affiliation within the state forest bureaucracy. The results show that state versus local knowing is not the most meaningful division in epistemology, and that it is the daily struggle over resources in local political economy that gives rise to contending accounts of nature and environmental change. The conclusions further point to knowledge alliances between state and local actors that render certain claims powerful and so determine natural resource management policy and direct landscape change.

Key words: local knowledge, Rajasthan, political ecology, epistemology.











For a [king] possessed of only theoretical

knowledge, and having no experience of

practical politics, is likely to commit seri- ous blunders when involved in actual works.

-Arthasastra, ca. 300 BCE

(Kautilya 1915, I, VIII, 14)

Foresters, it is often supposed, see forests quite differently than the farmers who live at the forest edge and the indigenous people who dwell within. As a result,

professional land managers are often criti- cized for inappropriate, bizarre, and harm-

* The research summarized here was made possible by funding from the American Institute of Indian Studies. Thanks also go to Ilse K6hler- Rollefson at the League for Pastoral Peoples in Germany; Hanwant Singh Rathore at the Lok Hit Pashu Palak Sansthan in Sadri, India; S. M. Mohnot at the School for Desert Sciences in Jodhpur, India; Mai Pal Singh in Sadri; and Sakka Ram Divasi in Mandigar. Special thanks to Lalit Singh at the Kumbhalgarh Office of the Rajasthan Forest Service. The author would also like to thank Sarah Moore, Richard Schroeder, and the anonymous reviewers, who provided valuable input for the drafting and redrafting of the paper.

















ful management practice. Moreover, the forester's ability to invoke "science" is sometimes condemned for helping to per- petuate policy in the face of local, conven- tional wisdom. Geographers and human ecologists in allied disciplines have amassed a body of work supporting this idea that state environmental knowledge, as promulgated by scientific planning authorities, has elided, shadowed, and crushed competing views of nature. Time and again, research shows that by "seeing like a state" (Scott 1998) environmental managers implement their own "administrative optics" and so fail their constituen- cies.

This suspicion of the state is in many ways a by-product of research into the breadth and value of local or situated knowledges. Since the 1950s, interest in sustainable ecological development has reasserted the value of "peripheral visions" of nature, located largely in the under- developed global South and long discred- ited in development (Conklin 1954; Brokensha, Warren, and Werner 1980; Denevan and Padoch 1988; Dove 1996; Sillitoes 1998; Warren 1991, 1995; K6hler- Rollefson 1995).





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THE PRACTICAL POLITICS OF KNOWING THE PRACTICAL POLITICS OF KNOWING THE PRACTICAL POLITICS OF KNOWING

These knowledges are increasingly filtered upward through nongovernmental organizations and used as the starting points for studies of environmental change (Beb- bington 1993; MacKenzie 1990; Zimmerer 1993; Murdoch and Clark 1994; Agrawal 1995; Forsyth 1996; Batterbury, Forsyth, and Thomson 1997; Sinha, Gururani, and Greenberg 1997; Escobar 1995). Unsatisfied with the romantic accounts of community often expounded in such cele- brations of situated knowledge, many critical scholars have broken apart the local scene to differentiate between its many classed and gendered knowers, even while maintaining a distrust of the state's way of seeing the world (Shiva 1988; Warren 1990; Cashman 1991; Leach 1991; Agarwal 1992; Gadgil and Guha 1995; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996).

This linkage of a concern for local knowledge with a distrust of state authority began a century ago, when the geographer and ecologist Peter Kropotkin warned against the possibility of "free expression of popular genius . . carried out within the framework of the State and [its] pyrimidi- cal organization" (Kropotkin 1987, 58). More recently, Nandy has stated that "the modern state has established such a relationship with modern science and technology that it has now become the major source of attack on all nonmoder systems of knowledge" (Nandy 1993, 270). Significantly, the state has failed in environmental development, not simply because it is manipulated by powerful interests or even because it is badly orga- nized, but because of the way it knows (Kloppenburg 1988; Jewitt 1995; Yapa 1996; Rajan 1998; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Robbins 1998).

And yet the state is complex, far more so than analysts of local knowledge often allow. Critical research has yet to investigate the state itself as a producer or appro- priator of knowledge, and real bureaucrats or scientists rarely receive the scrutiny of political ecologists (Dove 1994, 1995). Moreover, previous research has remained wedded to a foundational epistemology







that, while useful for evaluating the scientific veracity of differing knowledges, dis- courages the evaluation of how knowledge is itself constructed and how accounts of nature, even and especially scientifically verifiable ones, are rendered powerful and true (Willems-Braun 1997).

Does the state, for better or worse, think as a monolithic entity? What accounts for variations in and between local and state knowledges? Does distinct state knowledge empower official accounts over local epis- temologies? By exposing the "official con- structions of reality" perpetuated by the state, critical research has opened the doors to these important questions about state subjectivity but has failed to enter them through empirical research (Dove 1994). To that end, I here explore the political ecology of environmental knowledge at the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary in the Aravalli hills of India. I conclude, first, that differing livelihoods, resource endowments, career trajectories, and positions relative to axes of power correspond to differing environmental "knowledge communities" occupied by both state servants and local producers. And second, economic and political alliances formed among and between these knowledge communities delineate the schisms in knowledge and power that define environmental change and fashion management decisions.

In sum, I argue that the state does not produce knowledge to the exclusion of local accounts, but that it instead seizes and reproduces locally powerful knowledges and enforces management through alliances with locally powerful groups. For critical theory and development practice, this portends a more pragmatic approach to state environmental managers and knowledges. It also calls into question any simple view of the global trend to local/community environmental management by showing a case where competing alliances of state and local groups struggle over the devolution of power.

The paper is divided into five parts. First, I provide a background to the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary and its









127 127 127



ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

significance in regional ecology, discussing the difficult management decisions that both officials and locals face and whose res- olution depends upon knowledge of the forest, of its important species, and of its trajectory of change. Second, I introduce a method for empirically establishing the presence or absence of differing knowledges among and between local and state agents. Third, I show the results of the research, which point to social groups of shared knowledge. In the fourth section, I examine the "communities" of knowledge that emerge from these groups along complex power-laden axes and that each include both local and state agents. Finally, I conclude by suggesting the implications of these results for thinking about knowledge and encouraging democratic environmental development.

Resource History and Conflict in Kumbhalgarh

The need for manpower in the State of Kumbhalgarh was so dire, it is said, that men would soldier during the day and work their fields at night. To provide illumination for their work, from his fort high atop the Aravalli hills, the Maharana Kumbha burned an inferno of cotton and oil. The fire could be seen as far as Jodhpur, nearly 200 kilometers away, and it lit even the insides of closed houses, filling the night with a single light above the forest. (Traditional account)

Some five hundred years after the reign of Maharana Kumbha, the role of the state as a light in the forest persists in the form of environmental authority. The Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary is a 562- square-kilometer range of reserved forest under the management of the Rajasthan State Forest Department for the expressed purpose of preserving faunal biodiversity, including dwindling populations of wolf (Canis lupus), panther (Panthera pardus), and hyena (Hyaena hyaena) (Chief Wildlife Warden 1996). To that end, 50 full-time foresters are employed to patrol









and manage the forest, to guard against the poaching of animals, and to enclose roughly a quarter of the forest at any time for plantation. This bureaucracy includes a warden, who overseas management and sets forest development targets; 5 rangers who coordinate planting and enforcement; 12 foresters who patrol the forest, set and implement fines, and guard checkpoints; and up to 32 guards (or "cattle" guards) who patrol the forest and plant trees. Alongside this state presence and mandate, the forest still plays an important role in village life.

The Forest at Kumbhalgarh The forested hills of the reserve rise out

of the Luni river basin along a steep ecological gradient running from the semiarid plains of the Marwar region into the deciduous Aravalli hills of the Mewar region (Fig. 1). The northern plain is an open, sandy, alkaline basin sitting at an elevation between 300 and 350 meters, with an average annual rainfall of 424 millimeters. The southern hills and forest reach elevations of 900 meters and average annual rainfall of 645 millimeters, which arrives during the summer monsoon (India 1995). The popu- lation of forest users is stretched out in a string of villages following the boundary of the reserve; in the eight villages under study, 9,263 people live in 1,748 households scattered in clusters centered at open wells.

As a productive deciduous belt flanking an arid plain, the forest plays a crucial role in village production and reproduction, providing both resource reserves during dry seasons and years and key inputs into intensive agriculture year-round. Triple and quadruple cropping has been practiced in the region at least since the eighteenth century (Tod 1987). The regional pattern is one of intensive production, employing pump-set irrigation on smallholdings; 72 percent of all holdings in the region are 4 hectares or smaller and most are irrigated (India 1995, 1998). All rural households depend on the reserve for building materi-









128 128 128




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Figure 1. Map of the study area in southern Rajasthan, India. Figure 1. Map of the study area in southern Rajasthan, India. Figure 1. Map of the study area in southern Rajasthan, India.

als, fodder, agricultural nutrient inputs,' and thatch, while many continue to draw on the forest for medicines and famine foods. These extensive traditional use rights were encoded into the Rajasthan Forest Act of 1953, which established a

1 Farming on no less than 45 percent of the twice-cropped land in the region is maintained through the application of forest nutrients in the form of sheep and goat dung. This figure is





reserved forest, set fines and punishments for violation of state forestland, and allot- ted access rights and nominal fees for all those who demonstrated traditional use of the forest.

Like many postindependence state lands, most stretches of the Aravalli were traditionally the hunting reserves of elite,

based on field estimates of average available dung supply and demand from a sample of pastoral and agricultural households.







129 129 129




Rajput, warden-kings (Gold 1997; Haynes 1998) and later were scientific conservation sites under colonial authority (Chief Wildlife Warden 1996). Modem forestry follows many of the traditional rules, pro- hibiting hunting and tree cutting by locals, as well as the coppicing of trees for fodder. These rules are commonly disobeyed, however, and some locals cut trees with the permission of a bribed guard.

Alongside this local extraction, however, a regime of commercial forestry ran throughout the postindependence era, ending with the establishment of the reserve. Under a private contracting (theki- dar) system from 1955 to 1969 and later through direct Forest Department marketing of products (vepar vibagh) from 1970 through 1983, the forest has a long history of commercial use. Over the period, many species experienced significant declines, especially the tree species Khair (Acacia catechu), Safed Dav (Anogeissus latifolia), Karaya (Sterculia urnes), Salar (Boswellia serrata), Dav (Anogeissus pendula), Enro (Bauhinia racemosa), and Palas (Butea monosperma). By 1983, therefore, when the marketing system was abandoned altogether in favor of wildlife protection, local residents and foresters inherited an already degraded resource; tigers were last widely seen in the 1960s and are altogether absent today (Chief Wildlife Warden 1996). Under the new system, adjacent producers retained use rights in the forest, as laid out in the Rajasthan Forest Act, but the reserve would now be closed entirely to commercial extraction. This mandate would prove a difficult one to implement given the complex social and economic cir- cumstances of the area.

Local Communities and the Forest

Bureaucracy The eight villages flanking the central

part of the reserve are home to a wide variety of rural producers from a range of backgrounds and assets. While smallholding of irrigated land is a generalized adaptation,











variation in resource endowments and in local power continues to follow division in the endogamous groupings of caste. The Rajput community, traditional elites and landlords in the region, wield power in the postfeudal era through continued differential access to land resources and through association with powerful professions, including forestry. Strong and relatively wealthy landholding communities, including the Jat and Sirvi castes, still have larger- than-average landholdings and utilize most of the modern farming equipment, including tractors, pesticides, and hybrid seeds. Pastoral specialist Raikas, who traditionally herded large stock and especially camels, remain pastoral specialists, with smaller landholdings on average and large herds, increasingly of sheep and goats (K6hler- Rollefson 1992; Agrawal 1993). Several his- torically disempowered communities, including the Meghwal caste of leather workers by tradition, are granted "scheduled caste" status by the Indian state, with quotas and government programs geared to them. While these groups have increasing access to land and agricultural technology and while many of the wealthier members are indistinguishable in class and life-style from more powerful agricultural castes, they remain poorer on average. "Tribal" communities (Adivasis), including the Grassias and Bhils, retain the right to live in the forest. Many, however, make up the marginal agricultural labor force in the villages adjacent to the reserve. In sum, while caste discrimination has been techni- cally outlawed and the division of landholdings is more evenly distributed around Kumbhalgarh than in deeper desert regions, caste differences still loosely cor- relate with local power and wealth.

Management of the forest is closely linked to these local differences in power and resources. Bribery allows differential access to the forest, especially to large- scale tree cutting that drives an illicit regional wood economy. Although small- scale payments to corrupt officials are made by even the poor, the large-scale





130 130 130




extraction of trees at night by tractor is per- formed only by wealthy elites with suffi- cient capital for large bribes (1000-2000 Rs or U.S. $40 per tractor-load). The Forest Department itself has a greatly unbalanced representation of caste elites; of the 50 foresters in the Kumbhalgarh range, nearly 40 of them are Rajputs, including all of the higher officers (the assistant conservator or warden and range officers) and most of the middle-level officials (foresters). Increasingly, the bottom ranks of the bureaucracy are being diversified with the presence of agricultural and scheduled castes at the middle (forester) and lowest (cattle guard) rank. Tensions over enforcement also follow these local community divisions. Foresters are especially emphatic about the hostility of Raikas and tribals to their authority. In 1991, a forester was murdered on patrol and two Raika men were held on suspicion but released in the absence of witnesses. Clearly, the foresters' mandate to simultaneously manage the reserve and facilitate limited local extraction has become part of the ongoing local politics of environmental control, as seen elsewhere in India (Rangan 1997; Sivaramakrishnan 1998a).

Management Questions and

Knowledge The simultaneous mandate for wildlife

habitat protection and subsistence use brings with it several practical dilemmas. Specifically, it is unclear when the reserve should be opened and closed for extraction and who should have the authority to say so. The first problem is an extremely divi- sive one, both among locals and within the Forest Department. If the forest is fully opened year-round, many locals claim that degradation of the resource is inevitable. Others argue, however, that to more fully enclose the forest from its current ratio of 25 percent closed plantations at any time would not necessarily be beneficial to forest growth and would only increase destructive pressures on open areas.









Seasonal closure of the reserve, specifically during the rainy season, is another option, and some argue that use rights would not be infringed if the forest was closed for even two-thirds of the year.

The second problem follows from the first. Who should be allowed to make such decisions? Some foresters reasonably fear that further enclosure of the reserve, if implemented from the office of the warden, would only lead to more violation of the rules and to an increase in conflict. The warden himself, therefore, has suggested the creation of Village Forest Protection Committees, local village-level bodies with jurisdiction over an adjacent slice of the reserve forest. These bodies would be empowered to make decisions over open- ing and closing the reserve and over other matters, including fees and fines and grazing by outsiders. This would be an exten- sion of the Joint Forest Management mandate, much discussed but little evidenced in Rajasthan to date (Anderson 1995; Sarin 1995).

Many locals oppose the committees for political reasons; they are suspicious of their capture by caste and class elites, or are convinced that a "tragedy of the commons" failure would follow their creation. Some foresters support the notion, while many oppose it. Consistently, it is knowledge of the forest that becomes the core of arguments for or against forest protection committees. Some locals, both rich and poor, claim that foresters know too little about the forest, about how it is used and how it grows, to be left in charge of it. Other local people, both women and men, insist that it is locals who do not understand the dynamics of the forest and prefer the expert knowledge of the foresters. The urge to place the forest under central state or local control is divided, and the source of the divisions seems to follow no single axis of difference. To summarize, it is unclear, in this case, (1) what groups possess what kinds of forest knowledge, (2) whether state and local knowledges converge or diverge significantly, and (3) whether vari-







131 131 131




ations in knowledge are linked to preferences for local or state management. Here, questions about the production of different ways of knowing take center stage in com- ing to practical conclusions about not only how nature should be managed but also how consensus on the management of nature might be reached. Such questions, if theoretically driven, are empirical ones and require appropriate methodologies to answer.

Method: Querying State and Local Knowledge

This research, conducted in late 1998, set out to determine what variation in environmental knowledge exists at Kumb- halgarh, to explain what accounts for that variation, and to explore how some kinds of knowledge achieve hegemony. Environ- mental knowledge is hard to measure, however, and takes several forms. These forms include visions of nature, the priorities and

preferences for species and landscapes; attributes of nature, the inventories of

species characteristics and uses; and accounts of natural change, the explanations of recovery and decline. In India, visions of nature are examined most commonly in critical environmental development and cultural studies, especially con- structivist work on forests and forestry (Jeffery 1998; Uchiyamada 1998). Environ- mental knowledge as attributes of nature reflects the investigations of applied anthropology and ethnobotany, in India taking the form of surveys of indigenous plant knowledge, especially among Adivasi (tribal) communities (Singh and Pandey 1998). Accounts of natural change represent the concerns of hybrid research in political ecology and environmental history for eliciting theories of land degradation and recovery from local knowledge. I used three techniques to assess these forms of environmental knowledge or proxies for that knowledge. The first was a preference sort to evaluate priorities for the forest and











its species. The second was a use survey to assess techniques and applications for forest products. The third employed ongoing open-ended conversation about environmental history and change. The study group as a whole consisted of 157 individuals, in eight villages bordering the reserve, stratified to be representative of local caste divisions, including 20 women and 18 foresters at varying stages of their careers and levels of bureaucracy.

The first technique, a preference sort, presented respondents with photographs of 17 local plant species. These were selected to include grasses and trees, indigenous and exogenous species, and field and jungle species. Informants arranged these species from most favored and important to least favored and important.2 The order was recorded and the results were statistically analyzed using the PQMETHOD software package, which clusters the sorts and subjects them to factor analysis to distinguish factors of common preference.3 In this way, it is possible to determine clusters of respondents who prioritized specific species similarly and to empirically derive common clusters of similarly preferred and disliked species. Individuals were then associated with factor groups when their factor scores showed significance at the .05 level. In this way, I grouped respondents empirically into differing environmental visions/perceptions, running a total of 62 sorts, stratified by caste, and including 14 women of varying

2 This ordering follows the principles of Q- method. Q-method facilitates the creation of a typology of differential subjective responses whose characteristics are explored through ongoing conversation and discussion. Q is so named to distinguish it from R-analysis (for Pearson's r), which analyzes across traits rather than subjects, typically examining subjects or groups in terms of those traits (Fairweather and Swaffield 1994; Brown 1980; McKeown and Thomas 1988).

3 The factors were rotated using a varimax method of orthogonal rotation, a widely used technique for approximating simple structure.









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castes and 9 foresters at varying stages of their careers and levels of the bureaucracy.

The second technique, a use survey, was designed to investigate varying knowledges of the attributes of the forest environment. I administered a questionnaire to the full study group, asking respondents to list all of the useful noncrop species and the possible uses to which these species might be put. The survey revealed a total of 79 species important to household production and 113 species/uses. I also queried resource scheduling over the course of the year and included questions about perceptions of Forest Department policy. In addi- tion, ongoing conversations with respondents in the forest, at home, and in their fields revealed more subtle knowledge of forest products. In these discussions, vari- ous clues emerged which reflect specific environmental knowledges: the ability to distinguish grass species; to discern the qualities of wood, especially for construction; to recognize variations in fodder qual- ity; and to characterize the medicinal applications of plants or their value as human famine foods. Finally, I elicited accounts of environmental change, forest decline, and recovery, in particular, through ongoing conversation.

Knowledge Groups Four distinct knowledge groups emerge

from this analysis. These are most clearly evident in the result of factor analysis of the Q-sorts, shown in Table 1, where the four significant factors explain 67 percent of the









variance. The z-scores of individual species within each of the factors, shown in Table 2, demonstrate the meaningful variation in environmental visions and priorities that constitute the factors. Positive scores show preference for a species and those z-scores with p values of less than .05 and .01 represent values that are significantly distinct for that factor. Group 1 favors medicinal and famine food species, especially represented by Cassia aurticulata, a standard species used for stomach ailments in many households. Group 2 significantly prefers a cluster of herbaceous fodder species, jungle grasses, and fodder trees, like the valuable graze Cenchrus ciliaris, over other species. Group 3 shows a preference for jungle tree species, especially those construction species that are most widely found on the regional market, like the quickly disappear- ing Sterculia urens. Group 4 prefers tree species, especially those exogenous to the region not preferred by any other groups, including Eucalyptus tereticoris and the foreign Prosopis juliflora ("angrezi babul"). This initial exploration shows four very different sets of priorities, indeed four very different forests, in the minds of local producers and foresters.

I established four knowledge groups by grouping respondents with the factor for which their factor loading was significant at the .05 level. These groups can further be distinguished by the species they use and the kinds of uses they understand (Table 3), their accounts of environmental change, and by the class, caste, gender, and liveli-

able 1



able 1



able 1

Factor Characteristics for Knowledge Groups Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4

Number of defining variables 20 14 21 7

Explained variance .21 .13 .21 .12

Average relative coefficient .800 .800 .800 .800

Composite reliability .988 .982 .988 .966 Standard error of factor scores .111 .132 .108 .186











133 133 133




hood differences that parallel these differences in knowledge (Table 4).

The Famine Forest of Medicine and Fodder

The first and largest group, which prefers species with medicinal value or importance as famine foods, shows a similar orientation in their species use patterns, with the highest median number of famine food and medicinal applications and a high overall knowledge of the uses of forest species. This group includes the highest percentage of women and scheduled caste members surveyed. Of the women belong- ing to the group, a mix of caste and class backgrounds is in evidence; some of these women come from wealthier landholding families and agricultural castes, whereas most of the men come from marginal castes and tribes. It is likely that the gendered division of labor, in even middle and upper caste and class households, creates







differences in forest species use and knowledge. This group also shows the lowest education and lowest mean holdings of land and large stock. Summarized simply, the most marginal caste and class groups and a large proportion of mixed caste women show the highest degree of knowledge of famine foods and medicinal plants.

Among these respondents, a narrative of forest change that accounts for degradation through illicit cutting and bribery is most common. The account holds that the forest is increasingly "bald" or "thin" from cutting and that tractors can be heard nightly in the reserve. Most famine forest users, who have little stake in the regional timber market, see powerful producers around them as causing forest decline. Moreover, most of them view the problem as one of bribery, where wealthy community members pillage the forest through payments of money and liquor to lower-level forest guards. Since this group uses the forest most heavily in the winter and summer, when on-farm resources become scarce,

able 2



able 2



able 2

Distinguishing Species for Knowledge Groups (z-Scores) Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4

Where Dominant Famine Fodder Capital Tree

Species Found Source Type Attributes and Uses Forest Forest Forest Cover

Acacia nilotica Fields Domes Tree Household/construction 1.50** 0.65 0.43 0.90

Anogeissus pendula Jungle Domes Tree Fodder/construction 1.42 0.51 1.42 0.28 Aristida spp. Jungle Domes Grass Fodder -1.05** -0.08 -0.57* -0.13 Aziderachta indica Fields Domes Tree Fodder/medicinal 1.04 0.66* 1.56 1.42 Bauhinia racemosa Jungle Domes Tree Construction/famine 0.27 -0.63** 0.97* 0.58 Butea monosperma Jungle Domes Tree Fodder/famine 0.12* 1.36* 0.83 0.67 Cassia aurticulata Jungle Domes Shrub Medicinal 1.41** -0.91* -1.25 -1.60 Cenchrus ciliaris Jungle Domes Grass Fodder 0.34 2.00** 0.08 -0.98* Commelina benghalensis Fields Domes Herb Fodder -1.05 0.01 0.27 -0.73

Cyperus bulbosus Jungle Domes Grass Fodder -0.94 0.39** -0.78 -1.35 Dactylotenium aegyptium Fields Domes Grass Fodder/famine 0.21 0.59* 0.10 -0.22

Eucalyptus tereticornis Fields Intro Tree Construction 0.16 -0.40 -0.33 1.49** Ficus religiosa Jungle Domes Tree Sacred 0.12 0.03 -0.03 0.30 Lantena indica Jungle Intro Shrub N/A -2.11 -2.15 -2.14 -1.18*

Prosopisjuliflora Waste Intro Tree N/A -0.85** -1.44 -1.40 1.43** Sterculia urens Jungle Domes Tree Construction -0.25 -0.67* 0.70* -0.13 Urochloa panicoides Field Domes Grass Fodder -0.17 0.11 0.15 -0.76*

p < .05. ** p < .01.









p < .05. ** p < .01.









p < .05. ** p < .01.

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they favor the closure of the forest during the growing season when, they claim, the forest recovers from heavy cutting. They are somewhat skeptical about the state's current ability to enforce enclosure: "Is the forest better open or closed? Now the forest is both open and closed. It is open for those with money, but closed for those with none" (interview with Bhil agricultural laborer, September 1998).

For this reason, there is support for

Village Forest Protection Committees, though with slight ambivalence toward the

prospect. Most of the Famine Forest group support the idea that differential access to the forest through bribery would end with









local control. Others, especially scheduled caste members of this group, expressed concern that a local committee might reinforce the power of elites, who would control committee proceedings and decisions: "The forest belongs to foresters. Some people would only want to control a [committee] and make decisions for the others" (interview with Meghwal farmer, September 1998).

Two of the nine foresters in the Q-sample also fell into this knowledge category. One, a low-level forest guard, comes from a scheduled caste community and demo-

graphically matches other members of this

group. Intriguingly, the other was the assis-









Table 3

Forest Use Patterns of Knowledge Groups (Median Numbers of Species/Use by Category) Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4

Famine Forest Fodder Forest Capital Forest Tree Cover

Total species/uses 15.0 16.0 13.5 11.0 Field fodder 4.5 3.0 3.5 2.0 Forest fodder 1.5 4.0 2.5 1.5 Construction 3.5 3.0 4.0 5.0 Famine food and medicine 5.0 2.0 1.0 1.0

Table 4

Characteristics of Knowledge Communities

Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4


Percentage of village sample 34 27 31 8

Percentage of women surveyed 50 21 29 0

Percentage scheduled caste/tribe 50 25 6 19 Mean number of small stock 5.5 34.9 10.3 0 Mean number of large stock 3.1 3.6 4.8 5.5 Mean land area (in hectares) 1.1 1.1 2.2 1.9 Mean education (in years) 1.2 3.8 1.6 6.0 Seasonal forest usage Winter and Year-round Rain and winter Occasional

summer Narratives of forest change Illicit cutting and Illicit cutting and Overbrowsing Wood fuel

bribery bribery tragedy crisis Position on question of Support Support Opposed Opposed

village committees Foresters sharing knowledge Warden None Foresters Rangers

and some and some

guards guards

Table 3




Table 4










and some and some

guards guards

Table 3




Table 4










and some and some

guards guards

135 135 135




tant conservator of forests, warden of

Kumbhalgarh.

The Fodder Forest of Browse and Graze

Members of the second group show a

preference for forest grasses and trees with value as fodder, especially for small stock.

They demonstrate knowledge of the highest median number of forest fodder species and of species/uses overall. They also show the deepest knowledge of fodder types and

generally distinguish graze in a complex seasonal and areal typology. Demo-

graphically, this group includes many, though not all, of the pastoral caste members surveyed and shows much higher mean holdings of small stock than other

groups. This group also contains a number of women, though all of these belonged to the pastoral Raika caste. Thus, it would seem that gender matters greatly in

explaining environmental knowledge but that other axes of difference, like liveli- hood, are important for explaining the

knowledge of any given woman. All members of this group are year-

round users of the forest, grazing their animals in all seasons and favoring the open- ing of the reserve and the end of plantation enclosures within the forest. In describing environmental change, forest fodder users, like famine forest users, usually point to illicit cutting as the main cause of decline. The level of distrust and hostility to state

authority is highest in this group, and

notably, no members of the state forestry bureaucracy show this form of knowledge and none of the foresters Q-sorted or inter- viewed fell into this group. Members of this knowledge group supported the idea of a Village Forest Protection Committee, generally stating that with local control of the forest, restrictions on browsing and

coppicing would be removed.


Kumbhalgarh.















Kumbhalgarh.














Capital Forest of Wood and Construction

The third group, with preferences for construction tree species, not surprisingly shows a high level of use and knowledge of these species and, in interviews, reveals an extremely nuanced account of the varying construction uses of different kinds of trees. Ziziphus spp., for example, are known by group members to be easily workable and excellent for furniture but not of as strong and straight a grain as Bauhinia racemosa, which is better for wheel and well axles. At the same time, members of this group generally knew the least about other applications of forest products, especially famine foods, medicinal species, and wild fodder grasses. Members were most likely to be involved in the illicit wood trade and to have stock- piles of forest-harvested wood in and around their homes for the purposes of sale. Some admitted to selling tractor-loads of illegally harvested wood to nearby urban markets and to joining in nighttime tree harvests with the consent and aid of bribed foresters.

This knowledge group, holding a view of the forest as capital, has the highest mean landholdings and the lowest percentage of scheduled caste and class members. These are caste and class elites, both men and women, with strong economic connections in nearby towns and urban areas and strong social ties to many members of the middle and lower forest bureaucracy. In assessing environmental change in the forest, members of this group uniformly describe the problem as one of overgrazing, especially by small stock. Members of this group did not speak with a unified voice, however, on the question of local management of the forest through protection committees. Some of the respondents supported the idea in a general way, especially if such committees would bring under control the forest populations of Nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus) and Wild Boar (Sus scrofa), who raid landholders' crops at night. Most, however, opposed the formation of such







136 136 136




committees, describing their opposition with reference to a "tragedy of the commons" similar in form to that of Hardin's (1968) classic account: "Suppose that we all sitting here are a [village committee] and we decide together where and when to open the forest. Fine. But afterwards, she will go to work in her fields, and you will go to the market, but I . . . I will go with all my sheep and goats to the hills and there will be no trees standing for you people when I am done" (interview with Jat farmer, September 1998).

Four of the nine foresters who were sampled, all from the bottom or second level of the bureaucracy, also held this view of the forest, its species, and its vulnerabil- ity to illicit browsing.

The Forest as Tree Cover: State

Knowledge The remaining knowledge group con-

tains the handful of villagers who use the smallest range of forest products and who come from a group of somewhat better educated men with village-oriented production or craft jobs. These few producers uniformly support full closure of the forest, view the area as "tree space," and see ben- efit in the increasing coverage of exogenous tree species. In ongoing discussion, these producers mostly see the forest in a state of crisis from fuelwood demands.











Notably, this matches the concerns of many of the state officials in the area, and if there is a state vision of the forest, its important constituent species, and its trajectory of change, this would be it; Rajasthan state forestry programs are consistently designed around coverage target figures outlined in planning documents for the planting of foreign species (Robbins 1998). But if this represents a "state vision" of the environment, not all foresters seem to hold it. Indeed, a larger proportion of those foresters inter- viewed, as well as of those in the Q-sort, belonged to other knowledge groups and held competing accounts of what the forest is and how it is changing.

Foresters and Power/Knowledge

The knowledge group, bureaucratic level, and background of the foresters in the Q-sort are summarized in Table 5. These suggest a close relationship between the career trajectory and background of a forester and his way of thinking about the forest. Ongoing discussion and interviews with other foresters tends to reinforce this impression.

Foresters in Knowledge Groups All three of the Q-sorted range officers

fell into the Tree Cover group. This view

able 5






able 5






able 5

Knowledge Communities in the Rajasthan Forest Service

Knowledge Community Scheduled Pay Forester (Factor-loading) Caste/Tribe (in U.S. $/month) Education

Assistant conservator of Famine Forest (.8408) No 250 MSc + forests (warden)

Range officer 1 Tree Cover (.8590) No 200 BSc


Range officer 3 Tree Cover (.8078) No 200 BSc Chief forester Capital Forest (.9256) No 150 12th class Forester Capital Forest (.7550) No 150 12th class Assistant forester Capital Forest (.7802) No 150 8th class Cattle guard Capital Forest (.6676) No 85 3d class Cattle guard Famine Forest (.8737) Yes 85 None













137 137 137




fits a "state vision" of the forest and specifically defends the invasive Prosopis juliflora tree, the group's signature species (Table 2). According to one officer, "When you look at a picture of the area from the air, you see 30 percent of the land in forest. Without the [foreign] Babul tree, you would find no forest at all. The tree does our work" (interview with range officer, October 1998).

Here, the preference for introduced species is notable. Its linkage to the backgrounds of the rangers is important. All five were college educated and are, to varying degrees, involved in the illicit wood trade. All came from the elite Rajput group. In general discussions, many other members of the larger forest bureaucracy, including better-educated foresters and rangers, shared these rangers' understanding of the forest. Their account of change in the forest consistently revolved around the regional "fuelwood crisis," a problem invoked by only the small fraction of village producers who shared the Tree Cover knowledge group. Clearly, a form of official forest knowledge is filtered into this level of the state bureaucracy through the nor- malizing system of scientific education. It is further reflected in the rangers' suspicion of forest protection committees, the idea of which Tree Cover foresters steadfastly rejected. These foresters insisted that such efforts in community forestry must inevitably fail because villagers, driven by poor land management decisions and farm- level tree loss, would flood into the forest for fuelwood once they were left in charge of the reserve. Knowledge and politics are tied here in a specific way; accounts of decline are linked to species priorities and perceptions of control.

Foresters in the middle and lower ends of the forest bureaucracy share the understanding of the forest as an important source of tree capital held by many wealthy landholding villagers. Middle-level foresters come from similar caste and class backgrounds as the landholding elite, and they, along with many cattle guards, who are often from more marginal castes, are







tied to these elite communities through the system of bribery that supports the wood economy. Significantly, none held to a view of the forest as a source of fodder and almost all were emphatic about the funda- mental mismatch between forest tree cover and the demands of animal-raising communities. These foresters were largely opposed to forest protection committees, though for varying reasons. Some explained that local control was generally inadequate to prevent illegal extraction of fuelwood trees, while others described a more specific failure of overgrazing, as articulated by other members of the Capital Forest group described above. Clearly, a combination of social and economic experiences reinforces the commod- ified knowledge of forest products and explanations of environmental change within the state.

Although few foresters were members of the Famine Forest knowledge group, those that were represent important exceptions. In the sample, this group curiously included both a low-level cattle guard and the assistant conservator of forests, warden at Kumbhalgarh. In the wider informal survey of forester opinions and views, it was apparent that only a handful of foresters were widely aware of plants with value as famine food and medicine, underlining the tension between this way of knowing the forest and that of the bureaucracy. Those who held to this account were uniformly members of marginal and scheduled castes, especially the Meghwal community, whose households make up the bulk of the Famine Forest group in the village Q-sorts and who have only recently begun to establish a presence within the bureaucracy. The conservator/warden represents a more interesting case. With a family background of Rajput landholders and a scientific education, his profile would seem to best fit the state knowledge group who views the forest as tree cover. Yet his species of preference match closely those of the rural poor. The strong similarity of his environmental priorities to those of marginal communities, as revealed in the Q-sort, are fur-





138 138 138




ther reinforced in informal discussion, where he displayed a concern for protect- ing those species upon which producers depend daily, especially species with medicinal value and those with importance as fodder. His general knowledge of forest species is considerably higher than other members of the Forest Department, even those directly below him. This anomalous official is also most directly engaged in the effort to devolve management of the forest to forest protection committees, which would, he explains, sidestep the problems of graft he sees at the lower levels of his own bureaucracy. "[These vested] interests took two years for me to fully understand and another year or two to control . . . A warden may take five years to deal with these things, then he may be transferred, and the next one will have to start all over. Protection Committees will outlive any [warden]" (interview with assistant conservator of forests, October 1998).

By establishing village forest protection committees, the warden hopes to establish alliances with women and more marginal producers. His insistent hope is that women, scheduled caste groups, and tribals all become more active and assertive in local forest politics. In this way, he intends to make the lower bureaucracy accountable from both above and below and to control the illicit wood economy that he sees, as many marginal producers do, as responsible for forest decline. He also insists that while fuelwood pilfering is a nuisance, it is proba- bly not damaging to the forest in the long run. In attempting to overcome graft, the warden is in a struggle for power with the lower levels of forestry bureaucracy and with a deeply embedded system of corruption.

In the process, he is championing an account of environmental change that currently does not hold authority; by discount- ing the narrative of the fuelwood crisis, he is challenging accounts of change that hold power not only through the force of the state but through its reproduction by local elites. This view of the forest, matching that of marginal producers and many women, who are largely outside of the sys-







tem of graft, collides with both a view of the forest as capital and as forest cover, held by those at middle levels of the bureaucracy. The linkage of knowledge, priorities, and visions to immediate political concerns over the control of the forest is notable. Further, the connection of the upper bureaucracy to the most marginal communities defies any simple account of the elite state's uncontested attempts to erase the power of marginal groups. In internal struggles, the divided state builds alliances with groups within divided communities and so becomes entangled in local politics (Ribot 1996; Gururani 2000).4

From Knowledge Groups to

Knowledge Communities: Alliance, Division, and Hegemony

Clearly the state has no single or monolithic knowledge or set of priorities. While there does seem to be an "official" knowledge system in which the forest is seen largely as tree cover, regardless of species, this view is not held by all foresters. Rather, the positions of foresters fall into the knowledge groups of the larger community (Fig. 2). Notably, foresters and guards, tied by social and economic relations to landholding communities, share similar species priorities and explanations of change. Rangers, with their state-sponsored scientific train- ing, occupy the knowledge group closest to that of a privileged and hegemonic "state." Even so, the similarly educated warden shares the knowledge of marginal producers and many women, defying any simple division between science and knowledge type. Differing livelihoods and positions in the division of labor create different knowledges of the forest. Similarly, these posi-

4 Although the warden represents a fragile sample from which to explore this transforma- tion of the bureaucracy, the complexity in administrative knowledges and goals reflects global trends in increasingly fragmented state environmental management institutions (Chambers 1986; Sivaramakrishnan 2000).











139 139 139




Forest as Famine Reserve



Marginal Producer & Non-Pastoral

Women


Women


Women

Class/Caste

Guards

Bribery

Class/Caste

Guards

Bribery

Class/Caste

Guards

Bribery

Counter-Hegemonic Accounts

rs Warden )

Forest Committee


rs Warden )

Forest Committee


rs Warden )

Forest Committee

Forest as Fodder Reserve



Pastoral Producers:

Men & Women

Pastoral Producers:

Men & Women

Pastoral Producers:

Men & Women

) ) ) Privileged Accounts Privileged Accounts Privileged Accounts

Large Land Holders & Tree Traders

Forest as Capital


Forest as Capital


Forest as Capital

Class/Caste

Foresters

Class/Caste

Foresters

Class/Caste

Foresters Rangers

Forest as Tree Cover

Rangers


Rangers


Figure 2. Alliances across communities of knowledge and power. Figure 2. Alliances across communities of knowledge and power. Figure 2. Alliances across communities of knowledge and power.

tions put producers in differing positions relative to Forest Department authority and power. At the same time, different careers and backgrounds create different knowledges for foresters and position them differently in the local political economy. State servants and local groups are bound together in opposing knowledge groups.

In this sense, these shared visions of the forest create "communities." It is a shared vision of the forest that unites differing groups, and not only their material interests or goals. As the warden struggles to involve women and tribals in the forest management structure, it is with an understanding that their image of the productive forest is most like his own. Those locals who share an image of the forest as tree cover and understand forest decline to be driven by fuelwood demands support rangers driven by the notion of plantation. Disputes over proper management bring





together groups that may not share identi- cal material experience (defined in terms of class, caste, or gender), but that do have common notions of what the forest is and how it is changing.

These communities take the form of alliances when political struggles over authoritative explanations of change emerge. These struggles include debates over management (should power be devolved to village management bodies?), but also debates over what the forest is and how it is changing (what actions contribute most to local deforestation?). Since some accounts of the forest and its transforma- tion will hold sway while others will not, these knowledge communities become political alliances.

As currently configured, the institutions for resource management include a regime of tree cutting through bribery and a plantation system favoring tree cover as an end







140 140 140




in itself. The privileged accounts of what the forest is, represented by forest as capital or forest as tree cover, and of how the forest is changing, represented by the narratives of the "fuelwood crisis" or "overgrazing," reign in combination with these regimes of extraction and plantation. These are held in place through alliances between state and nonstate groups along lines of gender, class, and caste power. Forest guards meet with friendly local landholders on a regular basis, sharing liquor and pass- ing the time. They are socially, materially, and epistemologically allied.

Alternate views of the forest, represented by the forest as a famine or fodder reserve, and narratives that challenge these accounts, especially an explanation of degradation through corruption, exist as well. Moreover, they exist within the bureaucracy itself, at both its uppermost and bottommost levels. These counterhegemonic accounts are being advanced through the program of village forest protection committees, a state-sponsored program whose fate is linked to accounts of what the forest is and how it is changing. In an effort to implement a new notion of the forest, the warden must actually seek out tribals and women, contact representatives of marginal castes, and create a council structure in which these groups are fairly represented. Individuals in these politically marginal groups will have to reconfigure their distrust of the bureaucracy and some of its representatives in the process. The thin thread binding these material and political transactions is an account of the forest as a pool of minor product resources and an account of change targeting tree poachers. The negotiations required for the construction of such alliances were only beginning at the time this research was conducted, but the results are already becoming clear. As these meetings began, currently counterhegemonic descriptions and discussions of the forest emerged, including descriptions of often-forgotten resources and stories of bribery and late night cutting. These form the emergent foundations of a new state-local alliance.





Whether or not locals are actually degrading the forest through browsing and fuelwood collection or foresters are actually dismantling the forest through bribery and tree harvesting are not the most immediate questions. In either case, the account that prevails as truth will narrate who controls the forest and what form the strategy of conservation will take. The normal view of the forest, the normal account of ecological change, and the normal management system will be dictated through the creation of discursive hegemony. Knowledge groups in this way become knowledge communities and thereby, knowledge alliances.

Conclusions: State and Local Power/Knowledge

Previous research on state and local knowledge has sought to reverse the epis- temological categories of colonial inven- tion, putting local and marginal knowledges in positions of privilege usually afforded to scientific and state knowledge. This study expands on that project by deny- ing the primacy of those very categories of knowledge, themselves established under colonialism. In so doing, I have attempted to broaden the "forms of contention" by examining struggles within the state and the "conception of what is contended" by focusing on accounts of the environment (Peet and Watts 1996, 37) and employing methodologies, including the simultaneous exploration of bureaucratic and producer knowledge, to subvert the modalities of colonial thinking (Inden 1990; Cohn 1996). By dismantling the a priori and organic dis- tinction of local communities from the state that is so much a part of traditional historiography, it becomes possible to use a theoretical account of environmental knowledge as constructed through power to render empirical the question of differences in knowledge.

In the process, I have tried to decenter the state in the investigation of environmental knowledge and power, precisely because the state, following Foucault, does









141 141 141




not "occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations" (Foucault 1980, 122). The case of forestry at Kumbhalgarh serves to underline this fact. In sum, I have argued that the state is not a generator of a unique form of knowledge. Instead, it is a fractured knowledge reproduction machine that participates in epistemologi- cal alliances on the ground and writes the landscape not by bully or writ but through institutional formation. Moreover, state knowledge is dynamic within the bureaucracy, changing both from above, where sympathetic higher officers or "new profes- sionals" (following Chambers 1983, 1986) are involved in ongoing struggles for control, and from below, where new communities are entering the state apparatus. And finally, the decentralization of control over the environment in systems like Joint Forest Management in India may be less a transfer of power from the state to the local than a struggle over which part of the state and which part of the local will hold power (Sivaramakrishnan 1998b). Alliances of wardens with tribals and elites with guards show complex state-local relations and suggest that critical ecology need not abandon all hope of state cooperation (Jewitt 1995).

These lessons have specific resonance in the Indian context, where marginal communities have traditionally achieved some measure of power through the local state (Das 1998). Even so, they suggest a general reordering of research into local knowledge elsewhere, which either unproblem- atically narrates the state as environmental villain or simply tests the veracity of state and local accounts of environmental change. I have not argued here that real environmental change cannot be docu- mented or that competing state and local claims should not be adjudicated for sustainable development. Nor have I argued that the state, as a larger whole, has not participated in environmental adventures to pernicious effect. Rather, I have suggested that if geographers want to partici- pate in building a "democratic" environ-





mental policy, they cannot afford to discount the constructed nature of all stories about the environment, state, local, scientific or otherwise, such that "untruth is a condition of life" (Nietzsche 1989, 12). Geography cannot, therefore, overlook the agency of the state as it lives in the careers of its officials. Such agents are capable of producing a bewildering variety of accounts of nature and are effectively pushing to realize their visions, for better and for worse, in the lived reality of daily environmental politics.

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The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political Economy

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