Crafting the public sphere in the forests of West Bengal: democracy, development, and political action

Participatory conservation and development initiatives have proliferated all over the world as the 1990s became the decade for restructuring states and celebrating civil society. Examining one such major effort, called joint forest management, I propose several new directions for the anthropology of modernity, development, and environment. I scrutinize processes of local state-making in the forests of southern West Bengal, India, to reveal key tensions between development and democratization through an ethnography of political action.