UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

COMMONS IN THEORY: ASSUMED COMMONS IN PRACTICE

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.1080/14728028.2004.9752486

Authors

Subrata Singh

Reported year

2004

Reported language

pl

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:15:42.331196+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:15:42.331196+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

National Dairy Development Board

Documentary abstract — original language

For the last two decades there has been a distinct trend in India towards devolution: especially in the case of protection of forests through Joint Forest Management. There has been considerable discussion and divergence of opinion on the form of “rights” on natural resources both among the policy makers and the civil society. While some talk about ethical and proprietor rights to use natural resources others propose management or stewardship rights over the resource. Most policies of the colonial era—especially that of the forests—continued to be operational after independence. “Control” had been the major focus of the Forest Act mainly to facilitate revenue generation through timber management and the same continued till the 1990s. With inadequate provisions for the communities to meet their basic needs, local communities took control of the protection, regeneration and management of the resources. The protection by communities over many years, irrespective of tenure; has now been translated into claims—forcing the government to change and adopt the Joint Forest Management (JFM) policy. The introduction of JFM has led to the strengthening of the communities' claims for entitlement over the resource and the recognition of Community Forest Management1. While Joint Forest Management is the participatory forest management introduced by the State as a step towards devolution of forest management, Community Forest Management refers to the self-initiated forest protection groups with their own rules and regulations based on their natural surroundings. In this case, the commons are “assumed commons” and not commons in reality because the tenure of the land lies with the Government. The forests continue to be managed by the Forest Department and the revenue lands by the Revenue Department. In spite of the claims of the Government, in reality the policies today are far from what is required for the resources to be used and managed as commons. This paper attempts to put India's forest policies in a perspective of a wider “understanding of commons”, explains the concept of “assumed commons” and proposes a framework for the devolution of natural resources to the local communities based on the experiences of working with the self-initiated forest protection groups in India—especially the community forest management in Orissa.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W2081752748

DOI

10.1080/14728028.2004.9752486

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Natural entities mentioned

Forest

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1080/14728028.2004.9752486
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W2081752748

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1534690736 · CITES
• openalex:w2108919059 · CITES
• openalex:w2123704951 · CITES
• openalex:w2175723801 · CITES
• openalex:w2319472344 · CITES
• openalex:w3200194887 · CITES

0 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

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