3.1 Pre Colonial Times
3.2 Colonial Times
3.3 Post Colonial time
In the case of Forest Management, the history of deconcentration parallels the deconcentration noticed in the case of general administration but with some significant variation. For example, in India, around 1927, the forest management, so long a central matter, was transferred as a part of the revenue department to become a provincial subject. Soon the forest section became independent of the revenue department. The forest organization since then consisted of a Chief Conservator of Forests (CCF) located at the provincial headquarters, his deputies called Conservators of Forests, at regional levels. The next layer of Divisional Forest Officers usually at the district headquarters and his deputies Forest Rangers at the block levels. The set-up is almost similar to the general administration but with some basic differences. The most important variation is that deconcentration in forestry never went down to the village cluster level as it did in general administration and in legislative wings. Sometimes, a forest guard was entrusted with an independent responsibility of a small forest block but the forest guard was simply a watch and ward man and had no proper authority in any other forest duties. The most important variation however was that the forest department had always taken the stand of doing away with the private or communal ownership of land containing the forest in contrast to general administration which has championed the cause of private agriculture. In other words, in spite of an apparent deconcentration, the forest management continued to be a centralized system, which was mainly the result of state coercion. The local revolts were not powerful enough to confront or force a change of the policy of coercion.
The logic presented behind this centralization in forestry have been many. First, it was believed that the forest is a national resource which should therefore be utilized for the nation/state. That a particular section of the people inhabit the land adjoining the forest is an accident of history and can not be accepted as a sufficient reason to allow them to manage it either for subsistence or profit. The analogy presented is that of mining. Coal, gold, petroleum etc. belongs to the state which exploits it, no matter where they are found. Forests can not be an exception. Secondly, forests have effects that transcends the local environs. The local people will manage a resource keeping in mind its own local interests which may have disastrous effects on the outside areas. For example, the local interests may like to use it for fuelwood production while the particular forest may be a storehouse of biodiversity. Similarly, the people may use a forest area for grazing when it may be required to be protected from all uses being a catchment of a dam reservoir. Thirdly, the colonials and later the national government wanted the forest areas to be a source of revenue. For example, teak was extensively exploited by the British colonial government for ship construction, sal and pine in India for railway sleepers and so on. The revenue earned by the Indonesian government annually is second to the money earned by the country from petroleum, which is the largest money earner. In parts of India, the forest contracts, such as that of biri pata (leaves of Diospyros melanoxylon), earns so much revenue that it is often used by the people involved in this business as a leverage for political power. Fourthly, some forests were earmarked by the government or the rulers with the sole purpose of using them for hunting and rest for the royalty and the colonial officials. Fifthly, the control of such large forest areas provided political power to the centre. And last but not the least, the government thought wrongly, an idea still held by many, that the local people are ignorant of forests, their indigenous forest management unsustainable and unscientific. Thus the forest management should continue to pursue a policy of centralization. Only in the recent past, a number of initiatives in several countries have been taken more as an adjunct to the main policy of centralization. These initiatives however are certainly significant departures from centralization worth separate discussion.
Before the advent of the colonial powers in different parts of Asia and the Pacific, which happened around the beginning of the 16th century, the forest land was mostly under the use of the local communities. The nature of use to which the forest land was put varied from place to place, depending on the characteristics of the people who inhabited the local areas. Some used it as the hunting and gathering ground for subsistence. The gathering included fruits, vegetables, cereals for food, fibre for clothing, timber, fibre and grasses for homes and materials for daily use and medicine. Some other groups who have already been initiated into agriculture practiced shifting cultivation, which developed different forms in different areas (Banerjee, 1995). But there are some commonalties between them. An individual household chooses a certain area of a forest, cuts it down, burns the wood for the ash to add nutrients to the soil, cultivates the area for a year or two and then moves to another forest leaving the first one to fallow and thus to naturally reforest. The household comes back to the first area after a fallow period for recultivation. The fallow time used to be around 15-20 years, now in places diminished to 3-5 years. Besides the hunting and gathering and shifting cultivation categories, there were two other forms of forest use. In one, the forests were permanently felled for sedentary agriculture. In the other, home gardens were introduced. In home gardens, the original forest vegetation near the home was disturbed and replaced by species of trees more useful to the householders. The garden simulated the forest in having a number of artificially grown canopies of trees, shrubs, herbs and grasses.
Whatever the form of use, the forest area was under the control of one or a group of households, except in the case of hunting and gathering where the entire community was in control of the whole forest. The households did not have the ownership of the land which vested with the community or sometimes in a very vague manner with the sovereign. The management however rested with the household/s. In other words, the forest administration was deconcentrated to the household or a group of households or to the community level but the authority lay with the community. It has to be kept in mind that this devolution is not an introduced or imposed process but is a step in the naturally developing human society, which we have classified as traditional.
Except in a few countries, the equation between households, groups of households and community and the forest land changed dramatically with the advent of the colonial powers and consolidation of their hold on the countries concerned. The change was towards concentration i.e. the ownership was usurped by the colonial powers which took over as the sovereign power.
One of the earliest of such a change happened in Sri Lanka. In 1840, the British Administration promulgated an ordinance called Crown Land (Encroachment) Ordinance by which all forests, wastes, unoccupied and uncultivated lands were vested in the crown. The shifting cultivation land was considered as uncultivated and therefore came under the aegis of the ordinance. In Java of Indonesia, the proprietary rights of land in Java were vested to the sovereign by the British Administrator in 1811. By the Agrarian Act of 1870, the government accepted the local ownership only of continuously cultivated land which by implication excluded all shifting cultivation lands as not owned by the local community and thus subject to acquisition. In India, by the Forest Act of 1878, the British Administration acquired the sovereignty of all wastelands which by definition included forests. This Act also enabled the administration to demarcate reserved and protected forests. In the former, all local rights were abolished while in the latter some existing rights were accepted as a privilege offered by the government to the local people which can be taken away if necessary (Lynch and Talbot, 1995). Similar stories can be told of Nepal, Philippines, Malaysia and other countries.
The net outcome of the changed circumstances during the colonial period was that the forests came under the sovereignty of the state, which means a move towards centralization. The de facto situation was however different. Where the forest produces were immediately useful and valuable such as Teak in India, Burma or Thailand or Pine (for railway sleepers) in Garhwal Himalayas, the arm of the administration reached the forest for exploitation. Where however the forests were distant, needing large investment or the products were not marketable or the area was malarial, (e.g. Nepal terai) the local people, continued to use the forests as they used to do traditionally. For such areas therefore the de facto and the de jure situation were different which created a lot of tension between the people and the sovereign at a later stage of history. The perception of the users were that the forests belonged to them while the government functionaries believed that the forests were allowed to be used by the people either by default or as a gesture of goodwill. As the countryside opened up, as the demand of all types of timber developed in the local and in the international markets, and as the state realized the potential monetary and other values of the forests, stricter rules were enforced by coercion to bring all these forests under the state control.
3.3.1 India
3.3.2 Indonesia
3.3.3 Thailand
3.3.4 Papua New Guinea
With the departure of the colonial administration and attainment of independence, the noose of state control around the forests were further tightened and the traditional users were more and more left out. Only around 1970s and thereafter some initiatives in devolution were taken.
In 1953, which is a few years after the attainment of independence, the government took over the forests which were earlier with the zaminders. Even as late as 1980, the Conservation Act stipulated that the central permission is required to change the legal status of any forest, which is a concurrent subject. It has been ensured in the Act that even the practice of agro-forestry in a forest area will need central permission or else attract punishment. The moves towards centralization was intended amongst others, to keep deforestation under check, to earn revenue from the forests for using it in the country's developmental work, to conserve certain areas for ecological purposes such as biodiversity and soil and water conservation, to put a break to the fast dwindling animal life and so on. However, the intention was not matched by performance. Whether by design, inefficiency, lack of political will or centralization being a wrong policy, none of the intended objectives was attained in a significant manner. The states had faced obstacles to indiscriminately dereserve forests for ostensible development work, but overall deforestation went on increasing, the animal life dwindled further and the erosion of the forest land accentuated to clog the river valleys with more sediments.
Based on the provisions of the Indonesian Constitution, Basic Forestry Law enacted in 1967 empowered the central government to control all relations between the people and the corporations and the forests over about 143 million ha of Indonesian forests. Article 5 of this Law says, "All forests within the territory of Indonesia, including the natural resources contained therein, are controlled by the state". This includes private forests as well. The Central government used this law to take away gradually the adat (traditional) rights of the local people of the outer islands and to lease the forests for specific periods to the concessionaires for timber harvesting. Much of forest land was declared as terrestrial parks and reserves and permanent protection forest respectively (World Bank, 1993). In 1990, another scheme that impinges on the adat rights was introduced - namely timber plantation rights. By this the private, corporate and other bodies are allowed a tenure of 35 years and the rotation period of the dominant planted species to grow and exploit plantations in forest land (Lynch and Talbott, 1995).
Land Code of 1954 has the most important bearing on the question of land ownership and by implication on the process of centralization. Pah sa-nguan or the public forest land had many users or squatters for a long time. The Government by promulgation of 1954 land code provided the option that anyone occupying any forest land as of November 30, 1954 can receive a land using claim certificate provided he can prove his claim within 180 days. Few provincial farmers had been aware of this time stipulation, failed to take advantage of it and thus became encroachers. In 1961, the Thai government decided that 50% of the country should be forest land and as such started evicting encroachers to reach the target. In 1985, the National Forest policy reduced the target of forest land to 40% to release some land for other purposes but the objective was not realised. In fact, the Forest department undertook a programme of planting up the degraded forest which resulted in more evictions resulting in a political crisis (Lynch and Talbott, 1995). The net result of all this is that the centralization process for forest management continued in Thailand.
In contrast with other countries described above, the forest ownership was nearly completely decentralized. 'Under Melanesian tenure, resources are owned by groups but used by individuals (or more precisely by households)' (Talbott and Lyncy, 1995). The experience of forest management in the island therefor will be an interesting lesson about the effect of decentralization on forests.
