Organizing the Forest Economy with Prof. Ashwini Chhatre

Prof. Ashwini Chhatre dreams of radical forest futures. I play the devil's advocate. The dialogue was a wild, learning ride that challenged my perception of forests.

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When forests belong to everyone, they tend to get abused badly. When they are handed over to the communities who share a ‘sacred’ and intimate relationship with them, they tend to thrive. This approach worked reasonably in Nepal .

Can it work in India? Can it be extended further to build a thriving forest economy, forging trust to facilitate a ‘tripartite partnership between community organizations, public agencies, and private investors, primarily forest-based industries’?

Prof. Ashwini Chhatre straddles the world of research and action with aplomb.

He specializes in the interplay between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad.

When I learned about Prof. Ashwini Chhatre’s efforts at the Initiative on Forest Economy (courtesy my friend Vishal J ) to ‘upscale the recognition of Community Forest Resource (CFR) Rights and community-led governance for the protection and management of forests in India’, I was intrigued.

I reached out to Prof. Ashwini. He shared his paper in which he has built a framework for organizing the forest economy with community forest ownership as a fulcrum, focusing on building aggregation economies that are both equitable and sustainable.

We decided to do a podcast on his paper and the fascinating work he has been doing in the context of forest governance, whether it is leveraging technology for forest rights through 'Abua Bir Abua Dishom Abhiyan (My Jungle My Country) campaign or CommFor App which collects data for evidence-based forest policies.

“Organizing the forest economy”, at first blush, brings in a wall of resistance, or might sound like a paradoxical statement (how can you organize forest economy when forest as an entity is unorganized), especially, when the intent is spelt out as, in Prof. Chhatre’s words in a podcast, “make forest economy visible, one small step at a time”.

However, Prof. Ashwini’s interesting journey carries enough seeds of wilderness to?open me to possibilities.

”Between my BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and the start of my PhD at Duke, I spent 11 years working in different parts of India, mostly as a community organizer and social activist working on issues related to natural resources like land, forests, and water.” - Prof. Ashwini Chhatre from his Linkedin profile introduction

We don’t have clarity about what constitutes the definition of a forest in India.

While international organisations like Global Forest Watch (GFW) have reported that India lost approximately 23,300 square kilometres of tree cover between 2001 and 2023, the government claims a marginal increase in forest cover.

In his radical forest futures paper, Ashwini envisions that, based on secure tenure, community-based enterprises will be able to manage forests sustainably with support from industry and technology partners under the watchful eye of the forest dept. Is this feasible? How do we implement this vision, while staying true to the intent?

The conversation was a blast and Prof. Chhatre gamely responded to my cynical hat and shared fascinating insights to my questions. With eclectic examples from India’s tryst with women's equality rights, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and India Electricity Act, the podcast was a masterclass on India’s political economy, forest economy and how we need to rethink our relationship between agriculture and forest and reimagine plantation sector in an age runaway Climate Change.

Here are some fascinating insights I learned in this podcast. Many pointers below have been paraphrased from the conversations that emerged during this conversation.

1. When someone does well in a rural society, it translates into spreading of wealth and prosperity. Very few people in these kinds of traditional network societies can benefit only themselves.
2. If you align incentives and clearer property rights appropriately, the individual will move towards wealth and prosperity. The conversation helped me deeply appreciate the wisdom of Peruvian Economist Hernando de Soto who spoke often about the importance of property rights.
3. I learned about Prof. Chhatre’s inspiration, Shankar Guha Niyogi , who instilled in him the spirit of Sangharsh (‘Challenging Injustice’)and Nirman (‘Creating Alternatives’). Protest alone is not sufficient if it is not accompanied by reconstruction.
4. When Prof. Ashwini talked about his intent to, “make forest economy visible, one small step at a time”, my mind kept wrestling with the central question of legibility , something I explored in the context of understanding the role of middlemen in smallholding agriculture.

In James C. Scott’s fascinating book,?Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,?Scott examines a particular pattern of failure that kept recurring in various domains in the first half of the twentieth century, ranging from agriculture and forestry to urban planning and census-taking. He calls it Legibility. 

Here is an image from the book that graphically illustrates the central concept of “Legibility”.
<Image Credits: Ribbonfarm | Page 16-17| James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”>        

By making the forest economy visible, are we making the forest economy “legible” to the State, thereby disrupting the “illegibility” of the forest" and making it prone for exploitation?

Prof. Chhatre’s response was fascinating: Can we make it legible to the local communities? Can the communities see the forest for what it is capable of producing? When it becomes “legible”, it changes their motivation to preserve it for their futures.

5. When something is wild, we are willing to pay a premium for it. But at the end of that value chain, at the first mile, is a poor woman collecting seeds falling onto the forest floor in 45 degrees Celsius heat. Isn’t that a different level of invisibility? How do we make those invisible at the first mile visible?

6. Wouldn’t we need to strengthen governance structures and create an “enlightened form of governance” if we want to ‘invert the logic of treating forests simply as spaces for conservation’? Prof. Chhatre disagreed with my view and talked eloquently about the importance of a localized approach, acknowledging the diverse forms of governance that have emerged from the ecological indigenous traditions of this land.

7. “If there are forests left somewhere, we should not be trying to protect them from the people who live there. If the forests are still there, it's because of these people, not despite them.”

8. Is the climax of the popular Indian movie Kantara - which delved into the challenges of managing forests with the local communities- a fantasy or an idealized vision where we see the God of the community’s Indigenous tradition joining hands with people and the State? When technology tends to get weaponized at the last mile in informal societies, can we rely on technology to bring decentralized governance?

9. Prof. Chhatre’s response was deeply fascinating:

“In a political economy of rent-seeking where we have Veerappan and other things going on, we have the hubris of continuing to believe that we need to help these people and to do it in a way that takes them away from their forests”

10. “The forests are a space of production. And there are people who know these forests better than anyone else, including forest guards. Can we use that traditional customary practice to build something that actually helps them?”

11. When it comes to farmers, we are very clear that if you are a tenant, you will not invest in the land. If communities don't have security of tenure, why should they protect the forest? The central objective is the security of tenure. Community Forest Rights are just a legal mechanism. There can be other legal mechanisms and we are open to that.

12. We need to combine titles with aggregation economies if we are serious about creating economies of scale. When it comes to farmers,we are fully convinced. The same logic takes a long time for people to wrap around when it comes to forests.

13. Shifting the paradigm to think beyond forests as something that needs to be protected is the key. We need to think beyond the binaries of land conservation and land sparing.

14. It is unreasonable to have an FPC (Forest Producer Company, not Farmer Producer Company ), with 5,000 farmers from 20 villages, compete in the market for capital or buyers of their produce with the marketing budgets of Patanjali and Hindustan Unilever who buy forest products through invisible, informal, disaggregated supply chains.

15. The people who will start today - their children will go to college and potentially MBAs and come back and become managers. They will provide the kind of leadership that we aspire in the next generation. Until then, we have to link them to industrial value chains.

16. When we think of “forest”, the media has brainwashed us to think of this pristine,

17. 90% of the forest in India is fragmented landscapes with a lot of people and agriculture interspersed with small patches of forest that are linked together tenuously. There is a human-dominated multifunctional landscape that provides habitat to wildlife of all kinds; livelihoods to people that combine agriculture and forest.

18. It would not be as productive if it was only agriculture or only forest. They are interconnected ecologically in ways that are only beginning to understand.

19. If we start thinking of this as a forest landscape, most of the agriculture practised is rain-fed and not technologically very advanced. It doesn't use a lot of good seed varieties. These soils are very poor. The kind of productivity that we see in these agricultural lands is because of the contribution of the forests.

20. If we can integrate forests into the agricultural systems in forested landscapes, we won't need to go through the mistakes of the Green Revolution .

21. We need checks in the form of transparent regulatory systems. Decision making around forests is not transparent. Digital technology should allow us to do that.

22. In the case of forest, there is a zero-sum game and a positive-sum game. The zero-sum game is that if you benefit from the forest, the forest will lose. The positive sum-game is that we can benefit from a growing forest.

23. We have the administrative structures. We don’t have political will for the positive-sum game. The action is at the state level, before it goes to the central government. State level politicians are much more sensitive to and responsive to good ideas, if they can see how it can be translated into political credit and potential re-election.

24. We cannot afford to put arable land into non-food crops. In the future, we need to protect this land for growing food. We cannot grow sugarcane on it, we cannot grow maize on it to produce ethanol. It has to come from non-arable land. That is why forests are so important for the future of energy.

25. There will inevitably be some overlap between plantation and forest economy and it will be contentious. The plantation economy is growing on private lands, especially on rain-fed private lands. The extension of the plantation economy into the forests will be a bad idea.

26. Reimagining plantation systems would require assisted natural regeneration. The millions of hectares of barren forest lands that we have will not regenerate themselves. And if people are to do it, they will need some direct visibility of benefits.

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