1 - Access politics at the margins of Forest frontiers: Unravelling community forestry in the Jaunsar-Bawar region of Uttarakhand

This paper looks at the complexities associated with accessing forests and their resources by local communities in the Jaunsar-Bawar region of Uttarakhand and how these communities negotiate their access and control in the presence of these diverse actors to sustain their lives and identity. Forest frontiers are situated at the margins of civilization, and the forest communities living in and around them are ‘otherized’ and marginalized due to their belongingness to these spaces. Access of the forest communities to these marginal spaces is essential, as they depend on forests for their social, political, economic, and cultural existence. In India, access of these marginal communities to forests has not remained static across pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods. It has always been a matter of contestation between state and local forest communities.  Under the present circumstances, the management and access of forests in India are subjected to community or social forestry system. Although designed to benefit local communities and improve the status of forest conservation using their local skills and knowledge, community or social forestry has further complicated the issue of their access by bringing in new actors, such as private organizations, NGOs, etc., along with the contested presence of already existing state actors. Against this backdrop, the paper, using an ethnographic approach, tries to build on the experiences of the everyday life of local forest communities in the zones of forests and their engagement with forest resources amidst the presence of state and non-state entities.