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SUMMARY:The Limits of Stewardship: land rights\, legal mobilization by for
 est-dwelling communities and extraction in Odisha\, India. - Arpitha Kodiv
 eri\, European University Institute.
DTSTART:20210504T120000Z
DTEND:20210504T130000Z
UID:TALK159919@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Rogelio Luque-Lora
DESCRIPTION:The Forest Rights Act\, 2006 (FRA) of India was a significant 
 moment in the history of forest laws as it challenged the colonial forest 
 governance paradigm with the inclusion of forest-dwelling communities in c
 onservation decision making. This had not been done through a statute befo
 re. The FRA however creates a divide by legal design of who benefits from 
 the Act. It identifies Scheduled Tribes (ST) as the primary rights holder 
 to forest rights and introduces a new category of Other Traditional Forest
  Dwellers (OTFD) who have to provide evidence of 75 years or three generat
 ions of having lived and depended on forests. A mammoth task for communiti
 es who do not have access to such evidence. Through extensive interviews w
 ith the forest and local bureaucracy across the extractive frontiers of Od
 isha\, this presentation will bring to light how this divide by legal desi
 gn has resulted in a particular administrative-legal interpretation of the
  worthy and unworthy steward. The ST being viewed as a worthy steward whil
 e the OTFD communities being seen as the unworthy steward and thus not des
 erving the recognition of their forest rights despite providing the requir
 ed evidence. Drawing on the work of Alpa Shah and Tanya Li the question of
  concern for political ecology that this paper seeks to address is when pa
 rticular notions of indigeneity inform the understanding of stewardship in
  law what does the law in action look like? Does it create as Tanya Murray
  Li argues in the formulation of a tribal slot or eco-incarceration of Adi
 vasi communities as Alpa shah states or does it empower forest-dwelling co
 mmunities to address historical wrongs experienced by recognizing their ro
 le as stewards as environmental law scholar Kabir Bavikatte elucidates.  \
 n \nI argue that in extractive areas where land rights are so tenuous\, th
 e FRA with its particular understanding of stewardship creates a divide by
  legal design causing rifts within the forest-dwelling communities. The st
 ate merely reinforces these fissures with its understanding of stewardship
 . Based on fieldwork in three mining sites\, I demonstrate how OTFD commun
 ities are caught in a bind of proving their stewardship and relationship t
 o the land as being legally valid and as authentic as that of the ST commu
 nity. I address the ways in which they try to do this with the larger argu
 ment of the limits of the understanding of stewardship present in India's 
 forest laws that pits one vulnerable community against another. I explore 
 an alternative legal paradigm of the rights of future generations to overc
 ome this limitation.\n
LOCATION:Delivered online via Zoom
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