Abstract
This paper examines the history of forest restoration in India. While contemporary literature often emphasizes the novelty of forest restoration programmes as exemplified in large-scale global pledges such as the Bonn Challenge or the Trillion Trees initiative, we show that forest restoration has thousands of years of history in India. Furthermore, this history plays an important role in shaping current restoration efforts, in ways that often undermine restoration goals. We find four themes in this history: the definitions of forests changed as the national administration metamorphosed, the philosophy behind the afforestation practices transitioned from commercial to a focus on forest cover that still underemphasizes ecological and subsistence values of forests, the involvement of forest-dependent people in forest restoration has been limited by government policies through much of this period, and current restoration practice draws more from the history of commercial timber production than from contemporary restoration science. Drawing on these insights, we argue that restoration programmes need to be reconsidered in India.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1527-1540 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Land Degradation and Development |
Volume | 33 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for considering the manuscript for publication. Anirban Roy acknowledges financial support from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the Fulbright Commission in India (USIEF) through Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship 2021–2022 for enabling his stay as a Fulbright Visiting fellow at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, MN, the United States. Both the authors thank the support of UMN to cover the open access charges of the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Land Degradation & Development published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Keywords
- India
- afforestation
- colonial
- forest restoration
- postcolonial
- precolonial