Current practices of joint forest management in western India: A case study from Rajpipla forests

This study examines practices of Joint Forest Management (JFM) in eleven villages of Rajpipla forests in Gujarat State of western India. Despite a large variation in accomplishment among different villages, the results of JFM are encouraging. JFM has yielded both material and social benefits. Although many JFM forests did not improve, some forests are yielding more fodder, firewood, timber and a few non-timber forest products. Residents of successful JFM villages are satisfied with timber availability, but JFM lacks policy directives to guide local household uses of timber. Consequently, everyone, including forest officials, overlooks illegal forest use for reasonable household needs. Other useful benefits include democratic participation and conservation consciousness.; The JFM program visualizes an integrated resource management approach for forest and village development, but all JFM committees are preoccupied with forest protection and neglect the micro-planning process. This focus weakens sustainability of the program. Labor contribution for forest patrolling is the most common investment in forest management by villagers, but only two villages are sustaining forest patrolling. Both follow relatively formal and structured patrolling schedules. JFM committees also display variations in their propensity to regulate forest access. Patterns of forest-based conflicts indicate that exemplary deterrence, such as physical assaults and small cash fines, are commonly applied in cases of occasional violations of access rules. However, JFM committees do not follow graduated sanctions or a well-defined penalty structure. Conflict avoidance and tolerance are dominant strategies for dealing with everyday friction and recurrent violations by neighboring and traditional users. None of the JFM committees in the study area had used negotiation or other non-violent means for resolving conflicts with their neighboring communities. JFM committees seldom interfere in forest use of members and non-members within their villages.; Villagers anticipate production of wood and fodder sufficiently high to justify investment of their labor and time, but they are unable to estimate the expected production. Consequently, villagers deal with this uncertainty by using models of right behavior in their decision-making process. A consensus building approach moderates elite control of decision making, which is predominantly an informal process.; Villagers support the co-management process and want the Forest Department to take the initiatives for planning. JFM illustrates a radical change in the management philosophy from custodial to an entrepreneurial approach. The dissertation proposes a matrix model of behaviors towards self and others and suggests that JFM should be a composite of right-based and interest-based models.