Governing Forests: State, Law, and Citizenship in India's Forests

This book builds on years of fieldwork across Indian states, telling a turbulent story of battling for environmental justice.

It traces the continuing rhetorics of conservation and sovereignty in forest practices of the colonial and postcolonial Indian State, the entanglements between the climate crisis, resource extractivism, and eco-casteism.

It credits forest-dwelling communities for finding courageous and creative ways of securing their access and stewardship of forest resources, hoping for the possibility of “healing of historical antagonisms”.

It proposes a co-productive model called “negotiated sovereignty”, a governance paradigm rooted in a jurisprudence of care and repair.