Conservation regimes of exclusion: NGOs and the role of discourse in legitimising dispossession from protected areas in India

Abstract

In this article, we examine the discourses of NGOs participating in and sustaining India's conservation “regime of exclusion”. We suggest that these NGOs utilise discursive technologies to produce forests and forest-dwellers in ways that legitimise racialised and caste-based exclusion from conservation spaces. We focus on two examples. First, we analyse a petition filed by conservation NGOs against India's Forest Rights Act (FRA), which recognises the customary forest rights of historically marginalised Adivasi and Other Traditional Forest-Dwelling communities. This petition was intended to delegitimise the FRA, and it prompted a court decision that could potentially displace approximately 1.19 million forest-dwelling families. Second, we analyse how conservation-induced dispossession in India is increasingly framed as “voluntary resettlement”, which we suggest normalises and depoliticises dispossession and legitimises arguments against the FRA. Through these examples, we find that discursive technologies produce forests and forest-dwellers in ways that rely on and reproduce existing social hierarchies shaping access to land, resources, and power. We unpack the characteristics and motivations of this conservation regime; particularly the discursive productions through which conservation organisations position their “expert” forest claims above the claims of forest-dwelling communities, authorising the creation of “inviolate” conservation spaces through exclusion. Understanding discourse as the articulation of knowledge and power through which material realities come into being, we problematize the dominant understandings of conservation that underlie dispossession and the discursive technologies that legitimise it.