Thesis Defence by Arpitha Kodiveri

• Department of Law

Deliberating Development in India’s Forests examines how India’s forest laws and the right to free, prior, and informed consent or consent provision of forest-dwelling communities has shaped the relationship between the state and forest-dwelling communities in extractive frontiers.

The relationship between the state and forest-dwelling communities is tenuous as land in forest areas is acquired based on the Doctrine of Eminent Domain for extraction.

Through extensive fieldwork in the eastern state of Odisha, it offers an analysis of how the consent provision is implemented and how the relationship between the state and the forest-dwelling citizen is mediated by the probusiness bureaucracy as one of competing sovereignties. Drawing from interviews with forest-dwelling communities it makes an argument for the state to operate in a deliberative mode in India’s forests supported by a shared sovereignty framework and theories of deliberative and nodal governance with a possible institutional pathway to address land conflicts.