The success of forest governance reforms aimed at decentralisation, local participation, and sustainable resource use depends on the bureaucracy implementing such reforms. One such case of decentralised forest governance is the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in India, which recognises the rights of traditional forest dwellers to forest resources that they historically used. Most studies on FRA implementation have only highlighted the obstructionist role played by state forest departments. However, the implementation of the FRA is the joint responsibility of the revenue, forest, and tribal welfare departments. This article examines the role and interplay of power among all three departments in determining implementation outcomes. Employing bureaucratic politics theory and an actor-centred power framework, the paper argues that unless power inequalities within a multi-department implementation setting are addressed, failure in implementing decentralised forest policies is a foregone conclusion. Addressing these power inequalities through collateral structural changes in the concerned departments and regular training can help in effective implementation.

Tiger conservation in India has been driven for the most part by a philosophy that prioritizes the need for inviolate tiger reserves free of human beings. Such reserves, it is argued, provide much needed territory to ‘care’ for the tiger. In this paper, we examine the biopolitics of tiger conservation in India and argue that the current approach to tiger conservation amplifies the nature‐culture divide and ignores other imaginations of tiger conservation that are more cognizant of human—non‐human entanglements in protected area landscapes. The paper argues that tiger conservation has been a mix of sovereign, disciplinary and neoliberal environmentalities, all built on a certain ‘truth’ about tigers. The paper raises questions and concerns about the ‘truth’ discourse that underlies tiger conservation and also argues that tiger conservation has marginalized the environmentalism of the poor. It makes the case for more debate and discussion about tiger truths and suggests the need for a more than human approach to tiger conservation that recognizes the adverse consequences of fortress conservation as well as its limits in caring for the tiger in more than human geographies.

Confronting social exclusion is considered critical for grappling with poverty, livelihoods, inequality and participation in rural India. Studies highlight how exclusion is produced through hierarchical relations of caste, gender, class, religion, disability and ethnicity, while documenting people's agency to confront exclusions. However, the making of such agency through people's relations with ecologies and technologies is currently neglected. To address this neglect, we focus on different sociomaterial ways of relating – care and exclusion – which constitute people's agency. We argue that giving close attention to multiple ways of relating that coexist and interweave with each other, may be crucial for supporting grassroots transformations for justice and sustainability. To illustrate this ways-of-relating approach to agency, we rely on oral history narratives with three elderly people from rural Tamil Nadu, while building on insights from feminist scholars as well as science and technology studies. Central to the people's histories narrated in this article are uncertainties that yield non-linearities and loose ends. They foreground plural and flexible dimensions of each of our core concepts, from care and exclusion to intersections and relational agency. This open-ended plurality of dimensions, we conclude, may be crucial for concepts to find relevance in widely different settings.

The growth of brackish water aquaculture globally and in India is driven by a discourse that naturalizes salinity and sees aquaculture as an alternate livelihood and a good source of food and nutrition in coastal areas. In this paper, we take issue with such a discourse and argue in particular that brackish water shrimp aquaculture is as much a cause of increased salinity as it is a response to it. We also highlight, through a case study of two villages in south India, that aquaculture farmers are relatively influential in political and economic capital and are mostly not small farmers. The paper further claims the growth of shrimp farms in the region has resulted in a declining area under productivity of paddy cultivation and pollution of fishing grounds and drinking water as well. Our findings suggest the need for policy makers to take a more critical look at brackish water aquaculture and the possible irreversible costs that they might have on coastal lands and rural livelihoods.

Adaptive, inclusive and effective management of fisheries resources is dependent on knowledge from multiple quantitative and qualitative sources. As technology advances, there is an increasing interest in digital and automated solutions for gathering fisheries data. Small-scale fisheries (SSF) have presented a persistent challenge to many centralized quantitative data collection systems, and frequently maintain the status of ‘unreported’. This unreported nature often implicates SSF in the definition and discussions of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Monitoring, control and surveillance are seen as a vital part of the solution to IUU fishing, with substantial investment being put into increasingly sophisticated technology for tracking fishing vessels. For the past few years, India has been attempting to pass legislation to require all vessels, from small-scale to industrial, to install vessel monitoring systems on the grounds of national security and combating IUU fishing. However, there are concerns that a securitized and top-down approach to implement vessel tracking is not only wasteful but risks further marginalization of small-scale fishers from the resource, and fisheries groups from governance processes. India should seek to solve the underlying causes of IUU fishing while also developing collaborative monitoring and community-based management models. In this paper, we review evidence of emerging information and communication technologies and approaches in SSF and discuss how, if introduced and managed through collaborative processes, they could be used as a platform to strengthen inclusive governance, increase sustainability and improve wellbeing in coastal fisheries in India.

This paper is written in recognition of the contributions that Maarten Bavinck has made to the field of maritime studies and for the inspiration that he has been for many. It is hard to separate Maarten’s academic and institution-building contributions from his personal qualities, particularly his interest in human relationships. Maarten’s aptitude for building bridges between people, ideas, and institutions has allowed him to connect people in larger knowledge generation and action projects and forge new conceptual bridges. In addition to reflecting shortly on Maarten's key role in establishing the Centre for Maritime Research (MARE) as a institutional anchor in maritime studies, this paper reviews on some of his important and original contributions to four academic domains: legal pluralism, interactive governance, the study of fisheries conflicts, and the environment-development interface. Common threads across these domains include his long-term commitment to meticulous fieldwork in South Asia that grounds his work so firmly, his focus on achieving a more socially just use of marine and coastal resources, and his pragmatic approach that has led to original connections across distinct conceptual and institutional fields.

Social exclusion is considered critical for understanding poverty, livelihoods, inequality and political participation in rural India. Studies show how exclusion is produced through relations of power associated with gender, caste, religion and ethnicity. Studies also document how people confront their exclusion. We use insights from these studies – alongside science and technology studies – and rely on life history narratives of ‘excluded’ people from rural Tamil Nadu, to develop a new approach to agency as constituted by two contrasting ways of relating: control and care. These ways of relating are at once social and material. They entangle humans with each other and with material worlds of nature and technology, while being mediated by structures such as social norms and cultural values. Relations of control play a central role in constituting exclusionary forms of agency. In contrast, relations of care are central to the agency of resistance against exclusion and of livelihood-building by the ‘excluded’. Relations can be transformed through agency in uncertain ways that are highly sensitive to trans-local contexts. We offer examples of policy-relevant questions that our approach can help to address for apprehending social exclusion in rural India and elsewhere.

Prominent farmers and leaders in Hediyala and other downstream villages urged the Public Works Department (PWD) to construct a tank across Kudregundi Halla as it was frequently flooded in the rainy season. The PWD eventually acceded to the farmers' request after studying the flow of the stream, the quantum of water available and the geo-hydrological conditions. The socio-economic dynamics in Hediyala and Chilakahalli are important in the context of the conflict and the form it took. Hediyala is composed of Lingayats, Muslims, and scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Lingayats and Muslims have irrigated and better quality land and grow cash crops such as sugarcane and tobacco. The conflict between Hediyala farmers and Chilakahalli farmers over seepage water arose in 1995 when Hediyala farmers, immediately downstream of the tank, started using seepage water to grow water-intensive cash crops such as sugarcane, paddy and turmeric.

Poverty is now widely recognised as multidimensional, with indicators including healthcare, housing and sanitation. Yet, relational approaches that foreground political-cultural processes remain marginalised in policy discourses. Focusing on India, we review a wide range of relational approaches to rural poverty. Beginning with early approaches that focus on structural reproduction of class, caste and to a lesser extent gender inequality, we examine new relational approaches developed in the last two decades. The new approaches examine diverse ways in which poverty is experienced and shapes mobilisations against deprivation. They draw attention to poor people's own articulations of deprivation and alternate conceptions of well-being. They also show how intersecting inequalities of class, caste and gender shape governance practices and political movements. Despite these important contributions, the new relational approaches pay limited attention to technologies and ecologies in shaping the experience of poverty. Reviewing studies on the Green Revolution and wider agrarian transformations in India, we then sketch the outlines of a hybrid relational approach to poverty that combines socio-technical and -ecological dynamics. We argue that such an approach is crucial to challenge narrow economising discourses on poverty and to bridge the policy silos of poverty alleviation and (environmentally) sustainable development.

The Indian state has conserved tigers by establishing reserves that are governed as a form of fortress conservation. Residence and local uses in these tiger reserves are often criminalized It is in this context that we critique recent neoliberal attempts to estimate the economic value of ecosystem services from tiger reserves. Proponents of valuation argue that it will not only provide a justification for the reserves, but also recognize the importance of ecosystem services for human well-being. We use a political ecology approach to argue that economic valuation is never a benign tool, but is situated in wider institutional contexts that favor certain actors over others. In India, protected areas are being valued even as people living within them are being evicted and their use of the forest restricted. We draw from fieldwork in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Hills of Karnataka and conversations with Soligas. We ask how nature is made legible and who benefits from such legibility? We suggest that economic valuation can hide complex human-nature relationships and undermine different ways of knowing and 'valuing' landscapes.

The landscape of Gudalur, located in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu, India, has been shaped and re-shaped by multiple waves of in-migration that date back to the mid-nineteenth century. The political-economic imperatives for these phases of migration have ranged from the development of capitalist relations within the estate economy to the compulsions of the Grow More Food Campaign to the political repatriation of 'Indian' Tamils from erstwhile Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. This article focuses on how the politics of belonging in Gudalur is a consequence of this history and has resulted in a sedentarist metaphysics shaping state policy and contestations around conservation. The article highlights how the state increasingly sees adivasis (=indigenous people) as a possible ethno-environmental fix for conservation and how non-adivasis project their environmental subjectivities to claim that they too belong. By unpacking the politics of belonging through a historical account of the making of conservation in the region, the article attempts to illustrate how conservation includes and excludes people from the hill landscape.

This article critiques the increasing neo-liberalisation of energy production through a case study of the coal-based Cheyyur ultra mega power project in Tamil Nadu, India. Recent literature has suggested that the state has facilitated megaproject-based neo-liberalism by exempting such projects from both environmental clearance and land acquisition processes. We argue, to the contrary, that in the case of the Cheyyur thermal power project, the poor implementation of environmental regulations and land acquisition has given space to different local and supralocal actors to legally contest and challenge destructive development. In a context where coal-based energy production is becoming uneconomical and renewable energy is being increasingly promoted, this does not bode well for such energy projects.

Active land markets in the periphery of Chennai have resulted in large tracts of agricultural land being bought by non-agricultural actors seeking returns primarily from speculation. We argue in this paper that the financialization of land and consequent spurt of agricultural land sales are central to what scholars have termed land grab. Recent literature on land grabs has focused primarily on processes of accumulation by dispossession and the coercive role of the state. Our contention is that land grabs more commonly occur due to the state underinvesting in agriculture, resulting in dispossession by neglect of especially marginal and small farmers. Dispossession by neglect better captures the fluid boundary between the coercive and voluntary in contemporary land grabs.

The industrialization of fisheries and the growth of a capitalist sector within fisheries have received considerable scholarly attention. For the most part, scholars have emphasized how capitalism has led to privatization of the commons, forced small-scale resource users into wage labor, and marginalized the sector. This analysis does not, however, explain the continued presence of such a vibrant and important small-scale sector in fisheries throughout the world. Drawing on the notion of Foucauldian governmentality, other scholars have argued that the small-scale sector or what they term the "need economy" is a product of primitive accumulation. The state must, in conditions of democracy, address the welfare needs of all those who have been dispossessed in order to govern. We engage with this theorization in the context of fisheries and argue that seeing small-scale fisheries only as a product of primitive accumulation and Foucauldian governmentality ignores the moral economies of these fisheries. By analyzing capitalist transformation of fisheries in two "democratic" countries, South Africa and India, we highlight how small-scale fishers resist increasing marginalization and how governments have afforded a measure of protection to this sector, and confirm the importance of their moral economies to sustainable and equitable fisheries in the future.

We argue there is nothing inherent to political ecology that exceptionalizes humans over non-humans, as argued by Srinivasan and Kasturirangan in Geoforum recently. Political ecology’s main aim is to critique the discourses and practices of development and conservation, be it in relation to humans or non-humans, by examining the workings of political economy and power. It is, in other words, an analytical approach – not an ideology. If indeed political ecology has been guilty of inadequate attention to the non-human world it is because of its anthropocentrism and not human exceptionalism. We argue that prioritizing the non-human world is a normative choice and that retrieving its voice, however sensitive political ecology might be to doing so, will always be done within the social and political worlds that shape the lives of the non-human world.