Abstract
Past decades have been marked with grassroots struggles around the use and access to natural resources such as forests, both in the global South and in the global North. On the one hand, we have politicians, bureaucrats and others needing to deal with these issues at the national and global level. On the other, we have the material practices and struggles at the local level as well as a parallel discourse on decentralization to local areas from the past few decades. By tracing the historical changes in policies that touch on forests-peoples relationships in India and Sweden, I contextualize these trends by placing them in a historical context and examine the questions that are central to a critical examination for environmental governance today. I analyze how environmental policy-making shaped forest politics in the two places and what spaces it provided for environmental democracy—especially in relation to possibilities for people’s participation and for gender equality. I bring attention to the imperative to take account of questions of increasing expert dominance in environmental governance and local struggles, the space for local people’s participation in forest and rural politics, the gendering of these spaces and relationships and how that affects environmental politics.
Highlights
Forests have taken center stage in environmental policy with the threat of climate change.In addition to the importance of forests as resources, homes and livelihoods, forests are regarded as carbon sinks that could sequester carbon and halt climate change
Past decades have been marked by grassroots struggles regarding the use and access to natural resources such as forests, very much so in India and increasingly so in Sweden
Material practices of forest management and gendered struggles at the local level have contributed to a parallel discourse on the decentralization of environmental governance to local areas
Summary
Forests have taken center stage in environmental policy with the threat of climate change. The need to take action against climate change has galvanized policy makers, politicians, development and environment practitioners to pay attention to a global problem, and has put the spotlight on forests at an international level as well as nationally, both in India and Sweden. Material practices of forest management and gendered struggles at the local level have contributed to a parallel discourse on the decentralization of environmental governance to local areas. How may these issues of scale be reconciled? I analyze how environmental policy-making, both at the national level and through international agreements, shaped forest politics in the two places, how policy was implicit in constructing scale in relation to these places, and what spaces it provided for environmental democracy—especially in relation to possibilities for people’s participation and for gender equality
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