Between Panchayat, Community and the State: The Case for Joint Institutions for Managing Forests in India

One of the absorbing questions in institutional economics is the puzzle of how (or even whether) some communities are able to institute and maintain sustainable management regimes for their common property resources (CPR). India today is one of the more successful countries in forest conservation, inasmuch as it has been able to stabilize the forest area at around 69 to 70 million hectares, and even register a modest increase of some 3 mha over the decade 1997-2007. The means to achieve this, however, have depended historically on the system of forest estate notification or reservation devised by the colonial government in the 19th century in the face of a rapid over-exploitation of the resource and the increasing adverse impact of the resulting soil erosion and degradation of arable land. These approaches have excited much interest, and could provide an excellent setting to test some of the theories or hypotheses on what contributes to forest or CPR conservation in the context of institutional structures and practices.