Deliberating development in India’s forests : consent, mining and the making of the deliberative state

Abstract

Deliberating Development in India’s Forests is a thesis that examines how India’s forest laws and the right to free, prior, and informed consent or consent provision of forest-dwelling communities has shaped the relationship between the state and forest-dwelling communities in extractive frontiers. The relationship between the state and forest-dwelling communities is tenuous as land in forest areas is acquired based on the Doctrine of Eminent Domain for extractive industries. Through extensive fieldwork in three mining sites in the eastern state of Odisha, this thesis offers an analysis of how the consent provision is implemented and how the relationship between the state and the forest-dwelling citizen is mediated by the pro-business bureaucracy as one of competing sovereignties. The forest-dwelling communities describe that the state operates in multiple modalities in India’s forests to enable extraction and realize its pro-business ambitions. Drawing from interviews with forest-dwelling communities and their aspirational legal interpretation of the consent provision the thesis makes an argument for the state to operate in a deliberative mode in India’s forests supported by a shared sovereignty framework and theories of deliberative and nodal governance. The thesis charts out an institutional pathway to overcome the structural imbalance experienced by forest-dwelling communities in their negotiations and dialogue with the state. This pathway can pave the way to repair the ruptured relationship between forest-dwelling communities and the Indian state and entrench the state in its deliberative modality.