Colonial and Post-Colonial Forest Governance: Environmental Change and Contested Commons in Chamba, Himachal Pradesh

Historically, forests in the Himalayas have been used as ecological resources, cultural landscapes and common property resources which support the livelihoods of rural communities and the maintenance of biodiversity. Forestry has been a critical aspect of agricultural, pastoral transhumance and people's livelihoods in Chamba district since the dawn of time. The governance of these common resources, however, experienced a significant change over successive colonial and post-colonial regimes, both in terms of its administration, ownership and use. Although much has been written on colonial forestry and environmental history in India, few studies have looked to how colonial forestry has continued on to the present day and how it has affected environmental change and contested commons in an Indian valley of contested forest ownership, Chamba. The paper explores how forests governance evolved across time, through changing legal frameworks, administration and conservation policies, and the impact thereof on customary rights, forest management and common property resources. The study method is qualitative historical approach which is based on the District Gazetteer of Chamba, forest laws, administrative reports, government publications and relevant scholarly works. The results show that the colonial forest policies institutionalised state control by legal classification, scientific forestry and regulation of customary resource use, but the post-colonial forest governance did not significantly change the institutional framework though some more focus was laid on the conservation of biodiversity and participatory governance. The study concludes that the current environmental issues in Chamba are much more embedded in the history of governance in the kingdom than environmental changes in recent times. The paper merges three streams of thought – environmental history, political ecology and commons theory – and helps to understand how governance has affected the socio-ecological landscapes and competing understandings of commons in the western Himalayas.