FOREST GOVERNMENTALITY

Governmentality, as conceived by Michel Foucault (1979), is the association of the rationalities of the state, the technologies of power and the processes of subjectification, which needs to be understood in the broad sense of governing human behaviour. Subjectification, as coined by Foucault (Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1977, 1979, 2002; Lemke, 2000, 2001), refers to the construction of the individual subject. Subjectification is about ruling and controlling others by shaping their self-determination. It precedes the subject in the same way as the process of individuation precedes the creation of the individual. In the Foucauldian sense, the concept of governmentality refers to conduct, or, more precisely, to ‘the conduct of conduct,’ which ranges from ‘governing the self’ to ‘governing others’ (Lemke, 2001). Thomas Lemke (2000: 3) stresses that governmentality as an analytical tool ‘offers a view on power beyond a perspective that centres either on consensus or on violence; it links technologies of the self with technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state; and it helps to differentiate between power and domination.’ Governing others dominates the art of governing – the techniques in which the state and its power intervene into and manage the habits and activities of subjects (Rose et al., 2006). Governing people, then, is ‘not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarities and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself’ (Foucault, 1978, as cited in Lemke, 2000: 4). Given these perspectives on governmentality, a very relevant question for this paper is whether the trend of contemporary decentralised forest tenure reform in India – which seems to point to more opportunities for self-governance at regional and local levels – is not implicitly a continuation of ‘the conduct of conduct’ by the central state. This question becomes even more pertinent in view of the limited literature on decentralisation of tribal forest governance that uses a governmentality approach.

Foucault’s idea of governmentality is attracting increasing attention in studies on the environment, including in India (Agrawal, 2005; Birkenholtz, 2009; Guha, 1996; Sivaramakrishnan, 1995, 1999; Skaria, 1999). It has even been applied in the physical sciences, particularly geology. For example Braun (2000: 28) shows that ‘territory’ does not exist in the ‘objective’ problem of population, but when ‘the “right conduct” of citizens becomes a problem in ever new ways in response to nature’s construction.’ Governmentalisation of the environment has been a process of reshaping forest institutions, practices and subjectivities by the colonial and independent Indian states through the creation and execution of new laws, regulations and procedures for forest management (Agrawal, 2005). Poor forest-dependent communities living in and around forests were directly affected by many of the new regulations implemented by the colonial government (Guha, 1996; Skaria, 1999). Often, these forest-dependent communities resisted the processes of forest

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governmentalisation that redefined or denied their existing forest rights (Agrawal, 2005; Gadgil and Guha, 1992; Guha, 2001). Such forms of resistance by people against the external governance and control of environmental resources, be they water or forest management, are not exclusive to India. Generally, social struggles by people against forms of domination (ethnic, social or religious) and forms of subjugation have always been part of our society (Foucault, 2002). These struggles exist, as Foucault explains, due to a form of political power produced by the state that takes an interest only in the totality of the group of citizens, ignoring individuals.

In his interesting book Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects, Arun Agrawal (2005) uses the term ‘environmentality,’ referring to a fusions of the concepts of the environment and Foucauldian governmentality, indicating the ‘simultaneous redefinition of the environment and the subject as such redefinition is accomplished through the means of political economy’ (Agrawal, 2005: 23-24). Through the lens of environmentality, Agrawal shows us how technologies of power and government have been instrumental in shaping environmental subjects. Environmental subjects are ‘those for whom the environment constitutes a critical domain of thought and action’ (Agrawal, 2005: 16). The verb ‘subjects’ in environmentality, draws inspiration from Foucault, being a ‘form of power that subjugates and makes subject to,’ that is, ‘the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’ (Foucault, 2002: 331). Environmental subjects, being the forest-dependent communities in Agrawal’s study, not only adapt to the environmental regulation practices as set by the state, but also change their behaviour from initial resistance to state regulation to pro-active participation in forest management. However, the making of such environmental subjects – as non-identity-based categories, in contrast to ethnicity, caste or class – raises the question of how new social categories created by the state are instrumental in the inclusion and exclusion of the old identity-based subjects in forest governance.

Birkenholtz (2009) in his paper on groundwater deals with this latter issue. He exemplifies the state’s efforts to introduce new decentralised groundwater regulations in Rajasthan, India, and the ways in which these efforts were resisted by the villagers. His study examined the political-economic motivation of the state and other agents to produce ‘willing’ environmental subjects within the new decentralised groundwater reforms. However, in contrast to Agrawal, Birkenholtz’s case study indicates that social identities of farmers, namely caste and class, played a crucial role in influencing the groundwater reform policies. Stressing the idea that these farmers had multiple subject positions – related to state, caste, class and ecological change – he shows that such complex multiple subjectivities led farmers to either accept or resist the new groundwater governance reforms. However, the subject- making in Birkenholtz’s analysis is devoid of any history – or genealogy, as critical analysis of historically contingent discourses and practices (see Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1979; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001) – of governmental authority and of people’s resistance against the domination of the state. One assumption of a genealogical approach is that the processes of

37 producing (environmental) subjects in (colonial) history and its continuation in recent decentralised policy reforms inform scholars about current struggles (including resistance) by forest-dependent people. Tracing these historical processes helps us to understand the making, inclusion and exclusion of subjects, and the consequences – both intended and unintended – of new forms of environmental regulations for local people.

In this paper, we use governmentality as an analytical perspective to explore the history of changing forms of forest governance, institutional authority and social practices relating to scheduled tribes and ‘their’ forests, and its evolution over time. In doing so, we advance the notion of forest governmentality as a perspective on colonial and present India by taking into account scholarly work on subaltern (or tribal) studies (such as those of Guha, 1983; Skaria, 1999) and by focusing on less discussed issues in political ecology and in the study of the commons, namely tribal people as an identity category in forest governance. The tribal people as a ‘new’ social identity category have been an important phenomenon in India’s adoption of scientific forestry and in its recent shift towards decentralised forest tenure rights. While taking insights from the environmentality (Agrawal, 2005) and governmentality (Foucault, 1979) approaches into account, the paper examines how ‘subject construction’ and ‘forest demarcation’ has happened during colonial and independent India, how subjects were and are represented in laws and regulations, and how this has influenced the socio-political struggles of forest-dependent scheduled tribes. Doing so advances our understanding of identity-based categorisation of the scheduled tribes – in relation to historical re-definitions of forest ownership, access and rights – shaped by India’s new decentralised forest tenure reform for tribal people. Forest governmentality, we argue, is a perspective that – contrary to more mainstream accounts of forest governance – can critically scrutinise the legal and political- ecological dimensions of the subject- and object-making of the scheduled tribes and ‘their’ forests in India.

The paper discusses three dimensions of forest governmentality: (1) the history of categorisation, (2) the politics of social identity, and (3) the technologies of forest governance. These dimensions are based on the three general axes of government, as distinguished by Dean (2010: 27) in his much cited book on governmentality: episteme, ethos and techne. The first notion, the history of categorisation, refers to two intertwining entities, namely forests and the scheduled tribes inhabiting these forests, which together represent a strenuous past and a forgotten history of forest governance. It explains the historical construction of the scheduled tribes and forest categories in contemporary India. The second concept, the politics of social identity, though related to the above processes of categorisation, emphasises the ways through which the externally imposed social identities of ethnic communities – such as encroachers in or guardians of the forests – play a role in their inclusion in and/or exclusion from ‘their’ forestlands. Constantly, these communities struggle to identify themselves with or distinguish themselves from these imposed identities. This makes them all the more crucial to examine, because the imposed identities (or the process of subjectivation, whereby new

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moral subjects come into being via practices of the self) imply not only subjugation, but also certain degrees of empowerment (gaining benefits). The third concept, the technologies of forest governance, is concerned with the exercise of power, with the many means, mechanisms and instruments through which the governing of forests and people is accomplished. The new modes of decentralised forest governance policy, of which the recently adopted Forest Rights Act is one such instrument, have revived the century-old debate on rights versus privileges, and on forests versus human society.

2.3. HISTORY OF CATEGORISATION