Conservation-by-alienation: Koliwadi forest estrangement in Maharashtra,India

Abstract

Critical theory insists on a structural-ethical response to capitalism's intensifying socio-ecological crises. In efforts to transcend it, we must illustrate how Capitalism fails not just functionally e.g., by being crises prone, but also show how it morally and ethically corrupts our relationship to other humans and nature producing injustices and poorer forms of life. Towards such an illustration, the concept of alienation serves as a vital analytical construct. It reveals the connections and disruptions between the objective/material and subjective/psychological realms. In what follows, we use alienation to uncover the multifaceted impacts changing forest-governance regimes are having on community-forest relations in a village in Western India. Marxist notions of labour alienation are complemented with inputs from Rahel Jaeggi's social-philosophical treatise on self-alienation to delineate the multiple ruptures capitalist conservation (and capitalism) induces in forest-based lives and livelihoods. Specifically, we claim that the effects of fortress conservation be visualised as forms of alienation that persist even when the fortress has been weakened by forest-dwellers’ rights-based struggles. Older alienations manifest more subtly at the level of the forest-dweller self especially under conditions of insecure forest rights, increased commodification of needs, neoliberal treatment of land as capital and the longstanding marginalisation of Indigenous lifeways: factors present in our case but also in other post-colonial contexts. Together these factors give rise to socio-ecological relations that villagers themselves seem uneasy with. Although State forest officials we interview recognise the adverse influence of the wider political-economic context—including unabashed attempts by India's government to divert forests for political and economic gains—their preferred solution is to induce greater separations between forest-dwellers and forests. This perverse logic of (re-)imposing mainstream conservation on forests and forest-dwellers we term Conservation-by-Alienation, a tendency also witnessed in the global emergence of the ‘back-to-the-barriers’ approach and the financialisaton of nature.