Can indigenous political representation improve forest conservation? India’s experience

Can political representation by indigenous communities – often seen as stewards of forests – help enhance forest conservation? Or would indigenous political control over forests catalyse greater extraction for revenue gains? Does the level of representation matter? This paper addresses these under-researched questions, drawing on India's multi-layered enactments which granted Scheduled Tribes political representation, and hence influence over local resources including forests, in constituencies reserved for them in state assemblies and village councils. Taking Chhattisgarh state as an example, geospatial technologies are used for accessing forest cover, village boundaries, and village characteristics, to compare the state's 20,000-odd villages across diverse reserved and unreserved categories, over almost two decades, 2001–2019. It differentiates between Assembly Constituency (AC) reservations and PESA (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas) reservations – the former at the assembly level, the latter at the village council level – and between delimitation time periods. Over 2001–2019, village area under forest cover is found to have increased by almost 240,000 ha for the 10,554 ever-reserved villages, constituting four times the increase in never-reserved villages. Also, over 2009–2019, regression analysis (using different specifications) shows that relative to never-reserved villages the likelihood of an increase in percentage village area under forest cover was significantly greater in solely AC reserved villages, but significantly lower in solely PESA villages. Rural non-village forests also improved under AC reservation. This suggests a policy win–win for assembly-level representation in promoting both social inclusion and conservation. Divergent interests could, however, stymie village-level outcomes, needing additional incentives to conserve. These results also hold lessons for other countries with large forest areas and substantial indigenous populations.