The politics of conflict and conservation in the state of Kerala, India

This article puts forth the idea that ecology is political. The paper seeks to understand the underlying social, political and economic factors driving local conservation resistance. The study is in the context of mass protests in the southern State of Kerala, India, against the Western Ghats Ecological Expert Panel reports and a second High-Level Working Group that recommended conservation of the Western Ghats. The methods used are a content analysis of the Gadgil and Kasturirangan reports, a discourse analysis of 386 newspaper articles on the conflict, open-ended qualitative interviews and focused group discussions in the area with a high number of instances of conflict. We found that the Western Ghats is not just a mountain range to be conserved but a political construct that is imagined differently by actors operating at different scales. With technology, the State and the expert committees have tried to render this landscape legible through maps, databases, and satellite images. This legibility and its inevitable reductions poorly fit the dynamics of the local social reality and inevitably opened the door to conflict. The current push for conservation is set against the backdrop of a long history of state coercive evictions and a plantation economy that has resulted in drastic land-use change. Hence, conservation is often about control over space and resources and the meanings we attach to the resource we seek to conserve.