The Political Ecology of Non-compliance: Encroachment, Illicit Resource Extraction, and Environmental Governance in the Manas Tiger Reserve (India)

Abstract

This research investigates the interaction between environmental conservation and management in a protected area and the livelihoods of rural producers set against the political backdrop of an ethnically diverse and conflicted socio-cultural landscape. The establishment of protected areas for biodiversity conservation frequently separates people from their physical environment through an overall curtailment of traditional natural resource use. Indigenous or tribal people are regularly viewed forest stewards and victims of conservation enclosures, while being simultaneously labeled as forest destroyers and encroachers on biodiversity conservation landscapes. While existing literature has documented the impacts of protected areas on tribal people, as well as the formation of environmental identities and subjectivities among forest-dwelling communities, scant attention has been paid to how their interactions mediate environmental governance. This dissertation addresses this gap with data from sixteen months of fieldwork in the Manas Tiger Reserve (or Manas; Assam, India) utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the role of identity, livelihoods, and governance within a political ecology framework. A tribal identity within the Bodo ethnic group developed through interactions of within-group and externally-generated understandings of what it means to be ‘Bodo’, with the dialectic mediated by socio-cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors. Land use practices and livelihood generation strategies in the Manas landscape include illegal occupation of land within Manas for agricultural production, as well as illicit natural resource extraction (timber, fuelwood). The Bodo community has a dominant role in the governance of Manas, positioning itself as the protector of Manas while actively driving land cover change within the Reserve. These findings generate the following conclusions: the manifestation of a self-realized, ethno-regional Bodo identity occurs through socio-cultural conceptualizations, making a living in the Manas landscape, and an environmental subjectivity that positions Bodos as forest-dwelling people. Bodos socio-politically dominate non-tribal groups, illicitly extract Manas resources, while being key players in managing the Reserve. The result is an inconsistent domain that produces varying environmental subjects who both participate in and reject the technologies of the State through a lens of “technologies of the self”, thus straddling the gap between environmental legislation and its implementation in the MTR.