Carbon Forests at the Margins of the State: The Politics of Indigenous Sovereignty and Market Environmentalism in the North-eastern Hills of India

In the north-eastern hills of Meghalaya, the Khasi Hills project, self-advertised as ‘one of the first Redd+ initiatives in Asia to be developed and managed by indigenous governments on communal lands’, is often presented as one of the rare success stories of India’s recent experimentation with market instruments as part of its forest governance. This article uses this example to extend existing discussions on the neoliberalization of forest governance, and its intersections with the cultural politics of resource control. Unlike mainstream forestry projects criticized for being too concentrated in the hands of the Forest Department, this project explicitly taps into the particularities of a region located on the margin of the Indian nation-state, where, crucially, ownership and control of the land lie formally with the people rather than with the state. The article explores the politics of this curious marriage of (formal) indigenous sovereignty with market environmentalism, showing, first, the centrality of these assumed cultural and ecological specificities within the regime of justification of such market project; second, how the aspirations of project proponents for community engagement unravelled in practice; and, third, the limits of their endeavours due to larger structural social inequalities and the requirements of such market projects. I conclude with the idea that far from being anecdotal, this case brings interesting perspectives in the context of the struggle for the recognition of forest rights in the rest of India.