The Wood for the Trees

The study of forest-related conflicts in the Global South has largely focused on the struggles of forest-dwelling communities to defend rights to resources being usurped by states, usually acting in concert with private capitalists or elite groups. This article examines how these contestations over value are negotiated when they are institutionalized into legal-bureaucratic procedures of public decision-making. It analyzes the complex, even contradictory, stances of forest officials and villagers in the case of a proposed forest clearance for coal mining in east-central India. Drawing on the experience of serving on a government committee that evaluated the proposal, I argue that, despite the dominant tendency of the state machinery to endorse the exploitation of forests, bureaucrats may offer unexpected resistance when certain favorable conjunctures occur. Economic arguments about efficiency and rational use may be deployed against the grain to protect forests. An ethnographic view of bureaucratic practice reveals not only how value is appropriated through the structural violence of the state and its systematic exclusions but also how value may be defended and strategically redirected by state actors.