Is Joint Forest Management Indispensable for the Management of Forests?

Abstract

Joint forest management (JFM) involves forestry institution that promotes participatory forest management. This regime started in West Bengal and spread to the other parts of India, and further. Distinguishing feature of this regime is that the ownership of the forests here is retained with the government, but forest fringe communities are involved in forest protection in return for usufruct and benefit sharing mechanisms. It is distinct from community-based forest management (CBFM) in the fact that CBFM regime involves the participating community as owner and manager of the forests, whereas in JFM, the community only has rights to manage jointly with a government agency. The success of JFM in West Bengal, the locale of inception and its most successful examples so far, resulted in the raising of tree cover in West Bengal consistently from 1988 (14.32% of the total geographic area in 1988 to 16.67% in 2009) until the present. Much of this growth happened at a period of time when the overall global trend was a net green cover loss. However, there have recently been mixed reports of JFM success. This article uses a historical comparative method to examine the JFM in India, against global interest in citizen participation in such initiatives. Through comparative case study of contemporary political history, it is argued that forestry conservation initiatives are sensitive to, and also impacted upon, by the overall prevailing sociopolitical system and governance structure in vogue at the time. The forest management regime, therefore, needs to be modified as these realities change over time, for the successful continuance of forest conservation and management initiatives.