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Instead of being simply indifferent in the sense of losing responsibility towards the resource, users may react more aggressively against what they consider to be an illegitimate dispossession of their own wealth. These reactions may go much beyond spreading rumours maligning the integrity of certain officials and even local leaders (Messerschmidt, 1986: 473). In India, for example, this is attested by the explosive, 'quasi-insurrectional' situation of acute conflict between the Forest Department and the Adivasi in the Chotanagpur region of Bihar (Commander, 1986) or by the utterly negative reaction of Uttar Pradesh's forest-dwellers to India's national forest policy. In the former area, 'Ho tribespeople who have lost rights to forest lands have mobilised against official forestry programmes and developed a "forest cutting movement". Despite their ancient tradition of respect for forests, including the preservation of sacred groves for religious ceremonies, the Ho have turned to forest clearance as a means of asserting their rights to use the lands which forestry laws deny them' (Colchester, 1994: 83). Forest-dwellers in Uttar Pradesh manifested their anger in a similar way: in its extreme form alienation occasionally forced the peasant to degrade the surroundings he once lived in symbiosis with. The lack of interest that has, at times, been exhibited by forest communities in preserving vegetation on land that is no longer vested in them may be traced to the loss of community control consequent on state intervention . . . Today, in an ironical but entirely predictable development, villagers in parts of Garhwal look upon the reserved forest as their main enemy, harbouring the wild animals that destroy their crops. This is of course a classic form of alienation wherein the forest now appears as an entity opposed to the villager.
Above all, alienation signifies a mode of life in which circumstances distort man's innate qualities and compel him to act in a self-destructive fashion. (Guha, 1985: 1947)
All over Asia, the tensions between the government and the forest-dwellers are particularly acute because the latter have been considered for a long time by the former as marginal, backward people who need to be directed in a paternalistic way. (The problem is still more complicated when, as this often happens, forest people inhabit border areas and are perceived as a threat to national security.) In some countries, like Thailand and the Philippines, the government has not hesitated to treat those 'indigenous' people in a ruthless way involving forced resettlement (two and a half million of them are thus estimated to have been forcibly relocated in the Philippines) and sheer denial of national citizenship (in Thailand, 'hill tribes' have been denied Thai nationality and residence and even expelled into Burma by the army at gunpoint). It is a sad fact that, in countries like Bangladesh (in the Chittagong hill tracts) and India (in Assam State), progressive encroachment on tribal lands by lowland settlers and teaplanters has been actually supported by the government which refused to grant secure communal land rights to the tribal people (Colchester, 1994: 74-6).
Similar problems have sometimes been reported for Sub-Saharan Africa (Freudenberger and Mathieu, 1993: 13) and for Latin America. In Honduras, for example, a serious problem is the high incidence of illegal forest fires which appear to be 'set out of spite because the campesino believed that the Honduran Forestry Development Corporation has usurped his forest' (Utting, 1994: 252). More violent was the armed rebellion of several Miskito Indian organizations against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s. But the history of Europe is also instructive, as Guha aptly reminds us. There, too, the take-over of woodland for hunting or for timber production was deeply resented by the peasantry. For example, French peasants resorted to extensive forest fires at state incursion into their rights: in fact, they 'had come to hate the forests themselves, and hoped that if they ravaged them enough they would get rid of their oppressors' (Weber, 1976: 59-60, cited from Guha, 1985: 1947). The same kind of story repeated itself much later in the Asturias (Spain). Here, the Civil Guard had often to be sent to the villages in order to contain peasants' attempts to reassert local control over forests lost to the State. The tension mounted rapidly when, in the twentieth century, the government planted pine forests in selected uplands with a view to maximizing income from wastelands. These forests then became 'the object of local antagonism. Periodic attempts were made to burn them and return the monte to potential summer grazing for the community'. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, 'fires were set by unknown villagers or allowed to escape control by known villagers, destroying some mountain pine forest or scrub growth' (Fernandez, 1987: 272-3).
In many cases, non-violent resistance is the weapon most widely used by dispossessed villagers against the government: it can take on many forms including marching, rallying, setting up human barricades across the logging roads, ripping out seedlings, burning nurseries, chopping down eucalyptus trees, etc. These are the tactics adopted by the Chipko protest movement in Uttar Pradesh hills and the Appikko movement in Andhra Pradesh (India) which have a long history of popular mobilization against government control of forests (Bandyopadhyay and Shiva, 1987; Guha, 1989; Gadgil and Guha, 1994). It is, to a large extent, because of the dogged determination of Indian villagers and activists that the forest management policies of the government were changed (Colchester, 1994: 82-3). It is also interesting to note that the Indian administration had to enrol local inhabitants almost by force to have them participate in its social forestry programmes (Fernandes and Kulkarni, 1986; Fernandes, Menon and Viegas, 1988). In Thailand, Sarawak (Malaysia), and other Asian countries, similar protest movements using strikingly identical methods have developed during recent times. In the Philippines, by contrast, organized armed resistance has been resorted to in certain areas where people were being denied other means of expressing their opposition (Colchester, 1994: 84-5).
It bears emphasis that misunderstandings about new resource policies (all the more frequent as official rules are often unclear and ambiguous) and sheer distrust of a government's sincerity or ability to hold on to its promises may also account for non-co-operative behaviour of rural dwellers even in contexts where they could apparently benefit from the official resource policy. If user groups have the same feeling as this ex-village chief in Antsalaka (Madagascar) who complained that officials 'ask us only to protect forests; for whose benefit they don't say' (Ghimire, 1994: 221), there is little chance that effective management of natural resources will ensue. In Niger, villagers' reluctance to participate in village woodlots is to be ascribed to their scepticism regarding the government's real intentions. As we are told, many of them 'assumed that the woodlots really belonged to the government or to the forest service, which they feared would claim the wood at will and without further compensation for villagers' efforts' (Thomson et al., 1986: 404). As a result, they try to minimize their inputs: they kill off seedlings by benign neglect and, when a fence collapses, or when animals break through it, they do nothing to protect trees. A fundamental flaw in this experiment was in fact that the agents who established the woodlots gave no effective guarantees of property rights to the producer/users, nor did they provide any information about the distribution of trees or wood produced (ibid. 404-5).
In a reafforestation project in Azad Kashmir (Pakistan), the smaller farmers were reportedly 'fearful of losing possession or control over their land to the government once it was planted by the Forest Department, or of being deprived of rights to collect fodder and graze their cattle. Most of the smaller farmers interviewed indicated that they might offer small plots for project [tree] planting, provided they could be convinced that the Forest Department would not alienate their lands and that they would be able to cut grass for their castle' (Cernea, 1989: 220). In Uttar Pradesh (India), to take an additional example, villagers sometimes deforested woodland because they were 'apprehensive that the demarcation of reserved forests would be followed by the government taking away other wooded areas from their control'. More specifically, 'forest reservation evoked the fear that if the villagers looked after the forests as of yore, a passing forest official will say—"here is a promising bit of forest—government ought to reserve it". If, on the other hand, they ruin their civil forest, they feel free from such reservation' (Guha, 1985: 1946-7). In Orissa state, likewise, an evaluation of the Social Forestry Project conducted in 1987 found that '82 per cent of the villagers did not know how the produce from village woodlots would be distributed; most of the people did not expect any share from the final output and looked upon such woodlots as another category of reserved forests' (Cernea, 1989: 36). Lessons from Central America—which has experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world during the past three decades' confirm the extreme importance of a clear mutual understanding as well as solid trust between state agents and user groups (Utting, 1994).
As pointed out earlier, lack of genuine involvement or participation of user communities is often at the root of failure of social forestry programmes, so much so that the very term 'community forestry' has become a 'buzzword' or a 'mere untrue slogan' (Cernea, 1989: 33, 36). Failure is thus bound to happen when, as is frequently the case, forestry departments take full responsibility for the setting up of village woodlots which they then hand over to specially constituted but unprepared village committees. In the words of Arnold and Stewart:
Mechanisms for direct consultation by the Forest Department with villagers have generally not been put in practice . . . (Forest Committees) have been formed in an ad-hoc manner, without much if any prior consultation among the various groups in the village about their composition and in many cases were not functioning at all actively. . . The literature reports an almost universal failure to precede woodlot establishment with public discussion. Repeatedly reports record villagers being unaware that the woodlot had been established for the community; it was a 'government woodlot'. (Arnold and Stewart, 1989, cited from Cernea, 1989: 37)
The same criticism can also be levelled at India's fisheries policy which aimed at maximizing foreign exchange rather than state revenue. The sudden emergence in the 1960s of international markets (particularly in the USA and Japan) for luxury frozen fish (such as prawns, lobsters, and tuna) combined with pressure of strong balance-of payments constraints led the Indian government actively to support the growth of harvesting and processing capacities in Kerala state (in whose waters prawns and lobsters are highly concentrated) without considering its impact on the resource stock (Kurien, 1978). Such stories can be told for many other countries (in both advanced and developing countries) - in Vietnam, for example, 'a good part of deforestation is accounted by the felling of trees by the government itself for purposes of construction and for exports' (Rag, 1988: A-144) - and they clearly attest that it is risky to rely exclusively on the central government to manage and protect the nation's natural resources, especially so if such an objective demands substantial commitments of public financial resources. Given the proclivity of governments to subordinate environmental considerations to short-run economic or political interests, it is probably wiser, wherever possible, to economize on monitoring and information costs by directly involving user groups in resource protection programmes.
Besides or, more often, in conjunction with the above motivation, there is the well-known problem of the vulnerability or subservience of government agencies to business interests. In the aforementioned report by India's Department of Environment, the authors have found fault with 'the tendency of industry to use forest resources in an inefficient fashion because of the very low prices at which these are usually made available by the government'; as well as with the insufficient efforts of the government 'to prevent excessive felling by forest contractors' (Government of India, 1983: 2). That the government of India has made its forest policy too much reliant on private industrial interests has been a recurrent complaint voiced by the critics of its national forest policy (see, e.g., Fernandes and Kulkarni, 1983; Fernandes et al., 1988). Evidence actually confirms that many forest areas in India have been leased out to private industry as logging concessions.
Of course, this is not typical of India only (see Repetto, 1988). In a country like the Philippines, the situation has reached the most extreme proportions. There, the now defunct government agency Panamin (Presidential Assistance to National Minorities), which was officially set up for the purpose of protecting the indigenous people's rights and interests, actually played a disastrous role amounting to sheer betrayal of its mission. In the words of Marcus Colchester, 'far from preventing the pillage of indigenous lands by mining companies, loggers and hydropower projects, Panamin collaborated with the armed forces in depriving the peoples of their ancestral lands' (Colchester, 1994: 74). The fact of the matter is that the majority of this agency's board members 'came from wealthy industrialist families, many of whom had direct financial interests in companies encroaching on indigenous lands'. This was certainly the case for Manuel Elizalde, a relative of President Marcos, who played the key role in Panamin. His political base and personal wealth, indeed, lay in extractive concerns such as mining, logging, and agribusiness. Moreover, he maintained his own private army in Cotobato in Mindanao to fight the insurgent indigenous peoples who, in despair, took up arms against the government by joining the communist insurgency group (ibid. 75). Clearly, the problem is not only that private agents or companies acting as concessionaires often overexploit or misuse natural resources, it is also that they may easily behave in harsh ways with local villagers, for example by depriving them of access to customary resources to which they are or are not legally entitled.
The first effect is particularly damaging when the state actually subsidizes destructive techniques used or activities performed by private individuals or companies: just think of the considerable public support afforded by the cattle industry in countries like Botswana, Brazil, Mexico, or Costa Rica; or of the subsidization of imported trawlers in many Asian countries. With particular reference to Botswana, Zufferey went so far as saying that 'if one considers the amount of financial support allocated to the cattle industry in comparison to that allocated to planning and managing land resources it would not be entirely wrong to say that disaster is actually subsidised' (Zufferey, 1986: 89). In the case of Brazil, fiscal incentives to degrade forests include (i) the virtual exemption of agricultural income from income taxation that has the effect of adding to the demand for land (especially at the frontier where urban investors and corporations compete aggressively for land to establish livestock ranches); (ii) provisions contained in the progressive land tax that encourage the conversion of forest to crop land or pasture; and (iii) tax credit schemes aimed toward corporate livestock ranches that subsidize inefficient (extensive style) ranches established on cleared forest land (Binswanger, 1991). According to the same source, an upper-bound estimate of the effect of the last measure is 4 million hectares of added deforestation, mostly in the subhumid forest zones of Mato Grosso and Tocantins (ibid.: 828). As an illustration of the second (distributive) effect, we may refer to the situation obtaining in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. In the early 1970s, the Indonesian government granted timber concessions to a large number of foreign and national companies, and, according to Jessup and Peluso, this had several detrimental effects on local communities. In particular, 'despite their legal right to collect minor forest products within timber concessions, villagers have at times been denied entry to those areas, and timber company personnel have otherwise infringed on the rights of local residents'. For instance, there is evidence of company guards confiscating rattan from collectors, of loggers raiding caves and selling the stolen birds' nests to unauthorized buyers, and of timber companies illegally cutting Borneo ironwood, a species reserved for local use; such acts sometimes led to violent confrontations between local inhabitants and company guards or loggers (Jessup and Peluso, 1986: 520-1).
In Sarawak, Malaysia, forest-dwellers feel equally helpless even if, as in the case of Indonesia, the process of dispossession is less brutal and open than in the Philippines. We are thus told that, in Sarawak, 'the corrupting influence of the timber trade has promoted the domination of the economy by nepotistic, patronage politics', with the consequence that rural peoples lean no longer rely on their political representatives to defend their interests': as a matter of fact, 'the practice of dealing out logging licences to members of the state legislature to secure their allegiance is so commonplace in Sarawak that it has created a whole class of instant millionaires' (Colchester, 1994: 79). The consequences of this policy bias in Sarawak are particularly catastrophic. As a matter of fact, 'the World Bank has estimated that the country is logging its forests at four times the sustainable rate, while the International Timber Organization predicts that the primary forests of Sarawak will be logged out by the turn of the century' (ibid.: 82). In such circumstances, it is not surprising that most popular protest movements in Asian forest areas have directed their main criticism at the logging licences generously distributed by too often corrupt governments.
It is worthy of note that the process of dispossession of small people need not be brutal. It can just take place through the ordinary play of market forces. Thus, in Brazil, tax exemption of agricultural income (see above) makes it attractive for wealthy individual farmers to buy land from small farmers in areas of well-established settlement. 'Because the income tax preference for agriculture, agricultural profits, and other factors are capitalized into the land price, small farmers and other poor individuals cannot buy land in areas of well-integrated land markets. If they want to acquire land, they have to squat on land at the frontier' (Binswanger, 1991: 827).
Sometimes, it must be pointed out, even members of village communities may give in to the temptation to grant licences of resource exploitation to commercial companies (for example, by selling logging rights to timber companies) in order to secure cash income for meeting pressing monetary needs. Thus, for example:
Despite apparently secure land rights, New Guinean communities have frequently negotiated away rights over their lands, by leasing them to logging and mining companies in exchange for royalties. Only later have they come to regret the massive damage that their environments have sustained from such operations. . . many New Guineans are very inexperienced in the cash economy and even less aware of the social and environmental implications of inviting in foreign enterprises . . . many New Guineans have unreal expectations about what is achievable. Crucially, many no longer believe that their own future, much less that of their children, lies on the land. Taxation, schooling, labour saving technology, new fashions and consumerism have generated a demand for cash without the corresponding growth of a market for traditional produce. Cashing-in natural resources is thus the only ready option for most communities. (Colchester, 1994: 86-7)
When the story behind it is carefully scrutinized, however, one inevitably comes to the conclusion that it was a political decision unmotivated by considerations of long-term resource management. Witness to it the fact that President Suharto apparently did not consult with the Fisheries Department before making his 'bold' move: there was never any suggestion from this department for the imposition of the ban which was a unilateral decision of the President (Mathew, 1990: 34). That resource management was not the objective pursued by Suharto is also evident from the fact that (i) only 3 per cent of the total expenditure of the director-general of fisheries is targeted for fisheries resource management and environmental protection; and (ii) complementary measures have not been taken to protect the resource. Regarding this last point, it is noteworthy that the pressure on the resource has not been actually reduced. For one thing, the government has actively encouraged the development of aquaculture to promote prawn production. Consequently, mangrove forests (where prawns breed) have been massively converted into brackish culture ponds and fry and gravid females have been intensively harvested for the culture-farms, two processes which threaten to reduce the natural populations of all shrimp. (There is actually a ban on conversion of mangroves in the 200-metre greenbelt, but it is not being observed.) For another thing, small-scale fishermen could successfully replace trawling gear with trammel-nets and produce the same quantity of prawns as was caught before the ban (ibid.: 21, 28-9, 32-3).
What was the real motive behind the ban? According to Sebastian Mathew, on whose work our account is based, 'a plausible objective of the ban is the resolution of physical conflicts between trawlers and gill-net fisheries which were exacerbating from the mid-1970s leading to destruction of property, bloodshed and loss of lives' (Mathew, 1990: 35). Maintenance of law and order in the archipelagic waters seems to be of paramount importance in Indonesia. Since the process of integrating all Indonesians into one nationality is still in progress, it is crucial to keep the waters separating the six thousand inhabited islands as peaceful as possible. In so far as the fishermen provide the effective communication links between these islands, such an objective cannot be reached as long as violence reigns on the sea. Now, to understand why the problem of violence at sea was resolved by banning trawl fishing, a covert motive of Suharto must be highlighted. To understand this motive, it must be kept in mind that the ethnic factor plays a very important role in the economy of Indonesia. Ethnic tensions were largely prevalent in the fishing sector where a neat divide existed between indigenous small-scale fishermen and Chinese entrepreneurs engaged in trawler fishing (and also in the entire range of medium- and large-scale operations). The decision to ban trawling was therefore an anti-Chinese measure inextricably linked with the political atmosphere prevailing in the country. Suharto was in fact all the more vulnerable to popular resentment against Chinese economic dominance, as zealot Muslims resented the fact that he did not declare Indonesia as an Islamic State, and as he himself was well connected with Chinese financial interests.
Suharto was forced to take sides when the conflicts that broke out on the fisheries front, and were largely a protraction of ethnic riots in the mainstream society, got the support of Muslim leaders. More and more people from the non-fishing community joined the struggle against (Chinese) trawlers mainly because of ethnic reasons and 'by the late 1970s it was threatening to acquire extremely grave dimensions'. Against this backdrop, the ban on trawling appeared to Suharto as a providential strategic weapon to use with a view to gaining political capital on the eve of 1982 elections (Mathew, 1990: 34-9). Beneath or behind the rhetoric used to provide a resource management rationale to the trawler ban, the real issues were one of distribution—to redistribute fishing incomes from (Chinese) trawlers to (indigenous) small-scale fishermen—and one of law and order—to put an end to the bloody conflicts on the sea which were threatening to aggravate racial tension and to disrupt the whole socio-political fabric of the country. Due to a specific combination of circumstances, Indonesian state power had a political interest in changing access rules in the fishing sector. In so far as trawling is an aggressive technique, it is true that a trawler ban could have been a good beginning for the development of an integrated resource management system. That it was not so is hardly a surprise since conservation was definitely not the prime mover in Suharto's decision.
Obviously, 'law and order' and other political considerations need not prompt a government to take environmentally positive measures as in the case of Indonesian fisheries. They may as well drive it to behave in the opposite way. Under the pressure of strong political bases, the government may indeed refrain from applying unpopular conservationist measures. In Costa Rica, for example, we learn that non-enforcement of forest regulations has become 'an explicit strategy of the state to avoid or reduce tensions' (Utting, 1994: 239). Sometimes, it is powerful local bosses or patrons who may force the government to retrace its steps or to abstain from implementing management schemes. Thus, in some areas of Uttar Pradesh (India), the administration does not dare to mete out legal punishments or impose (legal) fines for contravening regulations (e.g. to cut off electricity for well owners who ignored spacing regulations) for fear of violent reactions by the people concerned and their determined leaders or for fear that they may shift parties in the next elections. As an article in The Economist reports:
Thousands of Mr Tikait's supporters bear guns. Mr Tikait tells farmers not to pay for canal water or electricity for their wells. No state government has dared cut off the farmer's electricity supply for fear of losing votes, or of tangling with Mr Tikait's gunmen. This erosion of the rule of law is happening, not in secessionist-minded Punjab Assam or Kashmir, but in Uttar Pradesh, the very heartland of India. (The Economist, 10-16 Aug. 1991: 23-4, quoted from Moench, 1992: A-11).
The 'softness' (Gunner Myrdal) of many States in the developing world actually points to an insurmountable limit to a top-down approach in which the State has to resort to taxes and fines in conditions of highly imperfect monitorability of users' behaviour. As a matter of fact, we have offered a theoretical argument to the effect that severe punishment has to be imposed to make up for imperfect information about users' behaviour if centralized management schemes are to be effectively implemented. It has to be added now that this solution may well prove impracticable in so far as the imposition of heavy fines or severe sanctions (like prison sentences) may cause considerable resentment among the populations concerned and thereby threaten the stability of the ruling political order. Or, such a measure will be somehow circumvented, e.g., through active corruption of the state agents in charge of fine collection, and the scheme will not be properly enforced.
In the above, we have laid much stress on the fact that the paternalistic, bureaucratic, and top-down approach followed by most governments is largely responsible for repeated failures of village-level resource management. What needs to be added before considering other important factors in the evolving environment (physical and human) of many Third World rural communities is that this criticism does not only apply to state agencies. It is also valid for international organizations, especially those which have assisted state-engineered resource management programmes in developing countries, and even for some non-governmental organizations which have not paid sufficient attention to people's participation. Thus, according to Cernea, the experience with community woodlot projects which have been so much in vogue since the late 1970s amounts 'to an extraordinarily telling case of an international programme intended to capture popular participation, which nevertheless was launched and generously financed without having elementary understanding of the kind of social process and system it needs to put in motion'. As a matter of fact, 'investment in the technical process outpaced by far the investment in the human/institutional process' (Cernea, 1989: 37-8). More surprisingly, as a case-study of Zimbabwe has recently revealed, non-governmental organizations involved in conservation projects are not necessarily better than large, non-voluntary public agencies in promoting a participatory, people-centred approach (Vivian, 1994).
Note that lack of attention to the relevant units of social organization and their internal dynamics explains not only management failures and resource use inefficiencies but also increasing inequalities and socio-economic differentiation. A vivid illustration of the latter possibility is provided by the World Bank-assisted Azad Kashmir Hill Farming Technical Development Project (HFTDP) in Pakistan. As a mid-term evaluation revealed, the planting of trees for reafforestation purposes which was reported by project staff to be on communal lands turned out in fact to be on land under individual private control. In other words, 'the tracts of shamilat [communal] land that had been offered for planting—and assumed by the project staff to benefit the communities—had surreptitiously changed their tenurial status to become private land. The de facto owners hoped to get "their" shamilat lands planted at government expense, without making repayment commitments. No community decision-making was involved, and no community woodlot was established' (Cernea, 1989: 21). The social polarization that ensued was not necessarily efficiency-promoting. In actual fact, the evaluator came to the conclusion that 'the wealthiest landowners, who have the resources to contribute to the costs of establishing and protecting tree stands, had not done so, nor did they intend to do so in the future. At one of the reforestation sites, I found that the main part of the 100 acres planted in the first year belonged to one influential family of six brothers, only one of whom was "almost" a full-time farmer, while the others were absentee landlords operating shops and small enterprises in Muzaffarabad' (ibid.).
Unexpected disequalizing effects have been reported for numerous other resource development projects at village level, yet it is not clear in many cases whether the processes yielding these effects have also been detrimental to efficiency. Thus, in the Ferlo of northern Senegal, wealthy Fulbe nobles have manipulated a donor project to fence off vast acreages of pastures around deep boreholes and, as a result, these parcels have become the private grazing areas of a few individuals (Freudenberger and Mathieu, 1993: 16).