Anwesha DuttaChr. Michelsen Institute | CMI
Anwesha Dutta
PhD
About
25
Publications
3,883
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
231
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Forestry and Biodiversity Conservation using a political ecology and conservation social sciences approach. Qualitative research methods.
Publications
Publications (25)
India is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world and hosts 10% of the planet’s biodiversity hotspots. In spite of this, all the major habitat types face pressure from rapid anthropogenic factors, including deforestation, habitat loss and conversion, land-use change, mega construction projects and indiscriminate hunting. Parallel to the im...
We systematize a large albeit scattered body of work linking the role of military to issues of environment in contexts of violen conflict. Starting with an overview of extant literature on issues around military presence and armed conflict, the impact of armed forces on environment and climate change in general, we zoom in on our empirical research...
For those concerned with the future of forests, the COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously offered cause for great concern, and renewed hope. On one hand, the pandemic is occurring at a time when forests are already under unprecedented pressures from climate change, amplifying concerns about unsustainable forest extraction in the name of economic rec...
- [...]
Online e-letter https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/36/eabb2824/tab-e-letters
Also available at:
https://biosec.group.shef.ac.uk/2021/05/14/whats-wrong-with-the-global-safety-net-approach-to-conservation/
Bradshaw et al. (2021) make a call to action in light of three major crises—biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, and climate disruption. We have no contention with Bradshaw et al.’s diagnosis of the severity of the crises. Yet, their call for scientists to “tell it like it is,” their appeal to political “leaders,” and the great attention t...
Bradshaw et al. (2021) make a call to action in light of three major crises—biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, and climate disruption. We have no contention with Bradshaw et al.’s diagnosis of the severity of the crises. Yet, their call for scientists to “tell it like it is,” their appeal to political “leaders,” and the great attention t...
This commentary will make an important contribution to the discourse surrounding green recovery from the pandemic with a focus on forests in the context of developing countries while also focusing on issues of return migration induced land use change in rural landscapes, the
important role of local institutions and conceptualization of forests as c...
The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered and intensified existing societal inequalities. People on the move and residents of urban slums and informal settlements are among some of the most affected groups in the Global South. Given the current living conditions of migrants, the WHO guidelines on how to prevent COVID-19 (such as handwashing, physical dis...
This chapter uses the case of a century-old local indigenous system of irrigation called dong or jamfwi practiced by the Bodo and a few other indigenous and ethnic groups on the Saralbhanga River, which flows down into the Indian state of Assam from the hills of Bhutan. The practice of jamfwi, especially in a borderland region plagued by decades of...
The Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in the state of Assam in Northeast India can be described as a landscape of terror since the area has been a stage for recurrent, mostly violent contestations along ethno-religious lines for more than four decades. Over the years, the violence has claimed more than a thousand lives and displaced...
The ranger workforce is currently characterized by an extreme gender skew. Exact data—or even reliable estimates—are scarce, but the general understanding is that only 3–11% of the global ranger workforce is female, with considerable local variation (Belecky et al. 2019). Although consideration of the gender context for a workforce often starts wit...
Countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of COVID-19 and control the economic fallout left in its wake. Rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for developing and implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infectio...
The prospects for Earth’s biological diversity look increasingly bleak. The urgency of global efforts to preserve biodiversity long predates the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic has added new dimensions to the problem. Conservation funding from nature tourism has all but disappeared with international travel restrictions, wildlife poaching is on t...
Using the case of the Ecological Task Force (ETF) of the Indian Army as an entry point, this contribution nudges the existing conceptual and theoretical views on green militarization and violent environments in the context of reserve and protected forest areas. This is achieved by going beyond coercive physical violence and accounting for forms of...
Policy Brief addressing the severe ecological and environmental crises in the Himalayan region and proposing an international governance mechanism for the region. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/asia
It has now been well established that forests in South Asia are postcolonial political zones. In Assam, in northeast India this was accomplished through the colonial project of converting jungles into Reserved Forests. Using the politics of dokhol (“to grab or occupy by force”) as an entry point, this article examines the comparative epistemologies...
This article seeks to comprehend the way the illegal timber economy in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Council (BTAD) in Assam is integrated within a constellation of power and authority. Based on over ten months of ethnographic field research, our analysis shows that the timber trade is indeed characterized by what can be conceptualized as an...
The 2014 Lok Sabha elections witnessed a significant shift in the political spectrum of the Bodo Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD) in Assam, with non-Bodos voting en masse for an independent candidate, a former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) militant who was backed by a collective of non-Bodo organisations. Using the elections as a fo...
Projects
Projects (2)
This project will pilot a novel approach to understanding the relationship between displaced people and the environment by conceptualizing refugee and IDP settlements as integrated social-ecological systems. We propose to couple an analysis of socio-ecological landscape change with qualitative, participatory, historical-ethnographic research to better understand the interactions linking refugee and IDP settlements to surrounding landscapes in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Karnataka, India. This four-year research is supported by NORGLOBAL, Norway.
