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CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 97, NO. 11, 10 DECEMBER 2009
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e-mail: nagendra@indiana.edu
Drivers of regrowth in South Asia’s human
impacted forests
Harini Nagendra1,2
1Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Royal Enclave, Sri Ramapura, Jakkur P.O., Bangalore 560 064, India
2Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), Indiana University, 408 N. Indiana Ave,
Bloomington, IN 47408, USA
While loss of forest cover continues to represent a
serious environmental challenge, significant reforesta-
tion is taking place in many parts of the world. This
article assesses the institutional factors that impact
forest management in developing countries, with a
focus on Nepal and India. Research methods link
empirical results obtained from multiple methods in
multiple field settings at different temporal and spa-
tial scales to look at the human drivers of forest cover
change across a range of social-ecological contexts.
The legitimacy of ownership, degree of monitoring,
density of forest users, and the flexibility to adapt to
changing conditions appear critical factors, although
the official designation of a forest tenure regime does
not appear to be as important.
Keywords: Forest transition, institutions, protected
areas, reforestation, South Asia.
Introduction
AS the human footprint on the earth’s natural resources
continues to expand, the earth’s environment and ecology
have experienced increasing deterioration over the past
several centuries. Declining forest cover has been one of
the biggest contributors to global environmental change,
impacting a range of ecological and environmental
services including global temperatures, health, biodiver-
sity, air quality, soil fertility and water flows. Reduction
in the quantity and quality of forests has also had a major
impact on the quality of life and livelihoods for the many
millions of forest-dependent inhabitants around the world.
These impacts are particularly acute in the tropics, where
forests coexist with high population densities1. This article
discusses findings from a set of studies conducted over
the past five years that is aimed at developing a better
understanding of the relationship between institutions and
forest change in such complex, human dominated yet
biodiverse landscapes.
While awareness of the problem of deforestation is
growing, considerable debates rage on the best way to
manage forest change. A basic problem has been the
availability of accurate datasets that track the extent,
location, direction and spatial pattern of forest change in
different parts of the world. Surprisingly, such informa-
tion remains elusive even in this electronic age, posing a
major barrier to our understanding of the drivers of forest
change2.
The most comprehensive, large-scale and long-term
datasets with information on forest change at a national
scale are provided by the United Nations Food and Agri-
cultural Organization (FAO): for 1980, 1990, 2000 and
2005. These data have been used by many researchers to
search for factors driving forest change, such as popula-
tion, at country scales (e.g. ref. 3). Yet, these data are
provided at different scales, based on information provided
by over 200 countries, and have been strongly criticized
for providing an inaccurate picture biased by changes in
methodology, and in frequently changing baseline defini-
tions of forest4,5.
Recently, this data situation has improved for the tropics,
with corrected estimates of FAO statistics5, as well as more
reliable and robust assessments of the rates of tropical
deforestation from large-scale satellite image studies6,7.
While these provide somewhat different estimates of
global forest change and show that deforestation contin-
ues to be the dominant trajectory of land cover change in
the tropics, they also point to something interesting – a
rising trend in reforestation, with an increase in secon-
dary forests in multiple parts of the tropics, including
countries as diverse as Bhutan, Puerto Rica and Gambia5.
The information provided by these large-scale datasets
is further corroborated by a growing body of recent litera-
ture, which suggests an increase in forest regrowth across
the tropics8–10. Large scale forest regrowth has been dem-
onstrated across countries as varied as Brazil, China,
Costa Rica, India, Mexico, Nepal, Puerto Rico, Tanzania
and Vietnam. This reforestation is often patchy, with tro-
pical forest landscapes typically consisting of a multiple-
use mosaic ranging from remnant forest patches to
disturbed and regenerating areas8. Nevertheless, the
areas of reforestation provide important environmental
services that range from carbon sequestration to soil con-
servation and the stabilization of hydrological cycles,
biodiversity conservation and the maintenance of ecologi-
cal services7,9.
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Forest transition theory
What drives this increase in forest cover? Two dominant
processes, or sets of processes, sometimes occurring in
parallel, have been put forward as explanations. The first,
macroeconomic explanation follows the lines of the Envi-
ronmental Kuznets theory, and applies mainly to forest
transitions in economically developed countries. While
the documentation of forest regrowth in the tropics is a
relatively recent phenomenon, forest transitions have
been previously noted in many economically developed
countries in the temperate world including Scotland,
France and the USA. The majority of these transitions,
occurring towards the last half of the 20th century, and in
contrast to the tropics, have been relatively well docu-
mented and researched. As these nations became more
industrialized and urbanized, there was an increasing
demand for labour in urban centres. The corresponding
scarcity of labour in the rural areas led to the abandon-
ment of agricultural farms on a large scale, resulting in
spontaneous reforestation9. This ‘economic development
path’ to forest transition has been observed in northern
Europe and north America after the first World War, and
in more recently, in parts of Asia and eastern/southern
Europe3,9.
A second explanation is based on microeconomic
explanations of forest scarcity. When forests are abundant,
there is little or no incentive to limit forest clearing. Once
forests begin to be cleared extensively, wood becomes a
scarce but important commodity, prompting large-scale
planting efforts by governments and local communities9.
Evidence for this comes from a diversity of countries in-
cluding India and China2. Yet, it is abundantly clear that
there are several countries across the world which now
experience fairly severe scarcities in forest products, but
are unable to reverse the trend of deforestation due to
factors that include the lack of supportive institutions,
corruption by local elite, and the collapse of civil autho-
rity2,9.
Developing a more comprehensive, area-specific and
robust understanding of factors that can drive reforesta-
tion in multiple contexts is critical if we are to hope to
encourage forest regrowth and arrest or reverse deforesta-
tion. These above described pathways, through important,
do not by any means explain all the trends in forest cover
observed. While playing an unquestionably significant
role in driving forest regrowth across the world, the eco-
nomic development path to forest transition is closely
linked with global and national policies and trends
towards modernization and economic development.
Although some countries have demonstrated this trend, it
is by no means universal and not of real assistance to
conservation agencies, government officials and scientists
interested in identifying policy interventions that can be
of direct assistance. Nor can we afford to hope that the
second path, an awareness of forest scarcity, will in itself
be sufficient to reverse the direction of forest change – it
has clearly been insufficient in several countries and
locations11.
Negative findings also prove difficult to reconcile with
these theories. There are many countries where no link is
seen between deforestation and per capita GDP, and no
systematic linkage between higher per capita GDP levels
and reforestation. Clearly, forest trends are not a function
of economic growth or income alone. Neither do there
appear to be direct links between country policies, gov-
ernance and forest regrowth. It is difficult to explain
trends in forest change by data collected at the country
scale. A binary classification into forest transition and
non-forest transition countries treats the issue at the
wrong scale and completely ignores the fact that any
country-indeed, even smaller regions, provinces or land-
scapes – will be composed of a mosaic of areas that are
experiencing reforestation, along with other areas that are
stable and areas where forests are disappearing at the
same time12,13. It is difficult to understand what drives
forest regrowth in specific areas by using aggregate
information that grosses over these important variations
in pattern, generated at gross scales. A better idea of the
local factors driving forest regrowth in different contexts
is clearly needed.
Forests and institutions
The data produced by the FAO Forest Resource Assess-
ment of 2006 indicates that Asia is the first continent to
experience forest transition since the mid 1900s. The
slowing down and reversal of tropical deforestation has
been noted in countries as varied as Bangladesh, Bhutan,
China, India, South Korea and Vietnam2,14. Nepal, while
experiencing net deforestation at the country scale, has
also demonstrated significant forest regrowth in the mid-
dle hills since the 1980s10,15. Reforestation in many of
these countries cannot be explained well by the forest
scarcity and economic development pathways2,10. This
implies the existence of other pathways and drivers, in
addition to these better described ones.
Tenure systems, while essential to an understanding of
forest cover change, have been largely ignored in discus-
sions of forest transitions. Developing a more compre-
hensive understanding of the range of institutional, policy
and tenure mechanisms that can help to promote refores-
tation is essential if we are to develop useful policy inter-
ventions. Considerable differences of opinion exist in this
regard. While many conservation biologists insist that
strict, nationally driven, protectionist conservation is
essential for the protection of forest habitat, others argue
that participatory community conservation with sustain-
able harvesting in ‘working forests’ can provide adequate
forest protection and forest regrowth16. The data on this is
mixed, with some cross-site studies indicating that gov-
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1588
ernment protected areas have succeeded in achieving
their conservation objectives17,18, while other studies
indicate that management by local communities can be
just as effective, if not even more so19,20.
Part of the reason underlying these differences in opin-
ion lies in the fact that forest change is a complex pheno-
menon, with multiple factors that interact at a range of
scales to drive change in specific directions. Thus, isolat-
ing specific drivers responsible for forest change in one
direction or another is a challenging task, methodologi-
cally as well as conceptually11. The task is further exac-
erbated by ideologically driven positions that have been
taken by many scientists and practitioners coming from
different positions. Finally, most studies are undertaken
in specific locations, with few attempts to establish a
broader understanding by undertaking comparative studies
of change at multiple locations. Thus, we need to go
beyond simplistic, limited and possibly flawed identifica-
tions of a single tenure regime or policy mechanism that
can lead to reforestation in all social, cultural and eco-
nomic settings, and instead to identify a range of factors
that appear to be significant in driving forest change in
one direction or another in different contexts. This will
help us understand when and why deforestation and
regrowth occur in specific regions within these larger
landscapes.
This article discusses initial insights from a set of studies
conducted over the past five years, aimed at developing a
better understanding of the institutional drivers of forest
regrowth in the Asian tropics. South Asia provides the
context for this research. India and Nepal constitute some
of the most densely populated of the world’s forested
countries. While both have experienced and continue to
experience significant deforestation due to human pre-
ssure, they have also shown significant regrowth since
the early 1990s (refs 2 and 10). Much of this can be
traced to the strengthening of effective national, regional
and local institutions12. While significant limitations still
exist, it is illustrative to examine these studies in the con-
text of work on collective-action theory as related to
common-pool resources.
Forests, like many other natural resources, belong to
the category of common-pool resources. They have two
main characteristics: (i) it is very costly to exclude poten-
tial beneficiaries from accessing and harvesting from the
resource and (ii) the amount of resource flows harvested
by one user is subtracted from the quantity available to
others21. Common-pool resources can be managed under
any of a broad type of property-rights regimes, from gov-
ernment ownership to private ownership, community own-
ership and open-access situations. When the resource is
open-access, in which there is no clear owner of the re-
source and unrestricted access is available to all, situa-
tions similar to the tragedy of the commons can arise.
However, if access is restricted under conditions of gov-
ernment, private or community ownership, then the
resource is capable of being well-protected, even regene-
rating over time21.
Over the past several decades since Garret Hardin’s
‘Tragedy of the Commons’ stimulated interest in this area,
many researchers have invested substantial effort in evalu-
ating the effectiveness of common property regimes and
government institutions for the protection and sustainable
use of natural resources22. The debate has been intensely
polarized, with some scientists (including several conser-
vation biologists) arguing that government-protected
national parks are the only way to achieve successful con-
servation, and others (including many social scientists
studying the adverse impacts of government institutions on
local people) that community control is the way to go. Yet,
it is becoming increasingly clear that no single institutional
type can be a panacea for effective management under all
situations23. Instead, one needs to look for rules-in-use
that can help increase the probability that a given manage-
ment regime – whether community, government, or
co-managed – can be effective on the ground.
Until recently, many studies such as Garret Hardin’s
classic paper on the Tragedy of the Commons24 predicted
that users of a common-property resource such as forests
were inevitably trapped into a situation where each user
acted to maximize their own profits, leading to overuse
and destruction of the resource. Yet, evidence is now
mounting that, under appropriate circumstances, local
communities can be very effective guardians of forest
resources. Drawing on evidences from a number of local
case studies as well as larger comparative cross-site
analyses, this article reviews evidence on forest clearing
and regrowth in Nepal and India to discuss under what
conditions local and national institutions appear to be
effective at promoting forest regrowth.
The local studies draw on methods developed as part of
the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI)
research programme. Coordinated by the University of
Michigan and Indiana University, this programme is cur-
rently active in 13 countries across North America, Africa,
Asia and Latin America12. This programme was designed
to further the study of collective action in the manage-
ment of forest resources by developing a long-term data-
base of the factors affecting forests and the communities
that use them. The IFRI programme has been active in
both countries for more than a decade, and provides us
with a large and valuable database that can be used to
evaluate a range of factors that have been identified as
impacting forest condition positively or negatively. The
interdisciplinary methodology developed for this purpose
documents biophysical measures of forest and environ-
mental conditions, demographic and economic information,
and data about institutions that impact forest resources.
These features make IFRI an attractive resource for the
assessment of hypothesized relationships among demo-
graphic, economic, institutional and biophysical variables
driving forest change.
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The range of biophysical and ecological context and
ecology, and diversity of tenure arrangements over which
this data has been collected, provide us with sufficient
variation to be able to derive insight into the impact of a
range of hypothesized drivers of forest change. This data,
collected at the forest/community level (usually at the
scale of forests that cover a few hectares to a few square
kilometers in area), is supplemented with remote sensing
analyses of forest cover change at the landscape level
(of a few square kilometers in area)10,12,13. Such a two-
pronged approach provides us with a way of going
beyond the FAO reports which focus at the country scale,
by integrating site-specific, in-depth understandings of the
social, institutional and biophysical factors at individual
locations, with broader comparative examinations of the
factors that determine why forests disappear, stay stable
and regrow in different parts of a landscape, and across
different locations.
Associates of reforestation
Tenure
While examining a range of official tenure designations
in forests located in Nepal, India and elsewhere around
the world, we find a range of management regimes asso-
ciated with effective forest management. In Nepal, some
community forests, leasehold forests and co-managed
buffer zone forests have shown significant forest
regrowth, others have remained stable, or even deterio-
rated over time10,12,13,18,25–32. In India, some government
protected areas and joint forest management institutions
can lead to reforestation, whereas in other instances, the
same tenure regimes are also associated with forest clear-
ing12,13,18,30,33,34. These findings are backed up by larger,
cross-country analyses that indicate that under effective
conditions, both government and community protected
areas are capable of providing effective forest protection,
even encouraging regrowth in many cases12,13,18.
Thus, it appears that formal ownership is less important
than the actual rules and mechanisms used to manage for-
ests on the ground. If forest regrowth can be shown to occur
under a range of institutions, what are the other condi-
tions that can facilitate or hinder successful forest man-
agement? Some other significant factors are discussed
below.
Monitoring
Monitoring has emerged as one of the most significant
factors that we have observed to be consistently associ-
ated with forest change. Without effective monitoring of
withdrawals from the forest and sanctioning of infrac-
tions, it will always be difficult to prevent overharvesting
of forest resources – as the temptations to extract
resources for personal use are always large. If forest rules
limiting access and harvest levels are either not known
(as often is the case for communities living in and around
protected areas), or are known but not considered legiti-
mate by local resource users, then there will be a need for
substantial investment in guns, fences and official guards
to patrol boundaries to prevent ‘illegal’ harvesting.
Without these expensive inputs, government-owned,
‘protected’ forests may not be protected in practise. In
these areas, the density of surrounding habitation is often
high and nearby urban markets generate incentives for
illegal wildlife and timber harvesting, as well as for graz-
ing. Both local communities and external poachers attempt
to harvest timber, graze cattle, and engage in other illegal
activities within the park, leading to frequent conflicts
with park authorities. Parks are often under-funded,
understaffed and ill-equipped to adequately monitor the
park, and enforce sanctioning measures on violators.
Such monitoring and sanctioning measures, while they
can be successful in the short term, also come at the
expense of increased conflict with local communities. On
the other hand, when efforts are made to involve local
people in conservation activities such as forest monitor-
ing and wildlife protection, substantial improvements
have been noted in some areas12,34.
In other contexts, usually found in community protected
or co-managed areas, when the users themselves have a
role in making local rules, they tend to participate more
fully in monitoring and sanctioning of over-extraction. In
co-managed buffer zone forests in Nepal, and Joint Forest
Management forests India, through government officials
make some visits to these areas for monitoring, the sub-
stantial proportion of the monitoring is contributed by the
communities27,29,33. These co-management initiatives have
the power of social approval behind them, and have suc-
ceeded in protecting forests even in the face of some very
difficult and insecure situations such as during the Maoist
insurgency in Nepal, signifying the resilience of these
efforts.
Experimental findings corroborate this, indicating that
when users are involved in decisions about rules affecting
their use, the likelihood of their following the rules and
monitoring others is much greater than when an external
authority simply proscribes and imposes rules on
them12,13,21. Social factors thus play a major role in the
effectiveness of such monitoring28. Interestingly, it appears
that even occasional monitoring, taking place every few
months, is sufficient to bring about change in community
monitored areas10. Even occasional monitoring can result
in social sanctioning by the community in which people
live. Given the closely linked communities within which
many people live in these contexts, this threat can be
quite effective in bringing about compliance from a wide
cross section of users21. In contrast, government-controlled
forests require frequent monitoring from armed forest
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guards and even this is often not enough to guarantee
compliance – or if it does, it comes at the expense of
great resentment and conflict with local users12,13.
Group size and collective action
Population has been frequently mentioned as a major
driver of deforestation35,36. These discussions completely
ignore institutions and the powerful capacities of people
to organize themselves into collective groups to combat
problems. We have found the relationship between the
size of a group and the likelihood of successful collective
action to be curvilinear10,27. When there are too few users
relative to the size of the forest (less than five users per
hectare of forest area), critical tasks such as forest plant-
ing, maintenance and monitoring cannot be carried out
effectively, and forest density tends to decline. When there
are too many users (more than 15 per hectare of forest
area), when there is enough labour available for forest
protection, planting and maintenance, cooperation and
coordination between users tends to break down, making
the task of forest protection even more difficult10. Thus,
forest management appears to be most effective at inter-
mediate group sizes between these extremes (also see ref.
37). Scale is an important factor that determines the rela-
tionship one observes between population and collective
action.
Flexibility to adapt to local context
Institutions need to be allowed the flexibility to modify
rules based on changing local environments and circum-
stances. Often this is not the case with national govern-
ments creating relatively inflexible one-size-fits-all rules
and limiting the capacity of local communities to adapt to
the change18,27,28,30. Often, neighbouring communities can
face dissimilar pressures on their forests due to ecological,
social and other differences, necessitating the adoption of
different institutional rules for effective management.
Yet, in the analyses of buffer zone user groups in the
Nepal terai plains, leasehold user groups in the middle hills
and Joint Forest Management programmes in India, we
found that these groups were asked to function according
to a rather restrictive set of management guidelines, in
which they had limited flexibility to modify according to
local circumstance26–30.
These restrictions have understandably created a sense
of lack of ownership in the communities and led to a
greater reliance on external technical and management
inputs provided by the state and international aid agen-
cies, as well as to conflict between those communities that
are part of these programmes and others who have been
left out of such efforts. In contrast, the community for-
estry programme, while still functioning under limitations,
has had a greater overall degree of flexibility to adapt and
modify management practises to local needs. Although
they have had initial problems, these community forestry
groups have experimented and learned from their initial
attempts, and are now putting better systems in place.
Thus, clearly, community groups do better when given the
flexibility to modify rules according to local social or
ecological circumstances.
Discussion
Loss of forest cover represents a serious environmental
challenge. Yet, significant reforestation has taken place in
recent years in many parts of the world2,9. The dominant
explanatory global frameworks of reforestation based on
explanations of industrialization, improvements in per
capita GDP, and increasing forest scarcity, fail to ade-
quately explain reforestation in many developing nations
including Nepal and India, where biodiverse forests co-
exist with densely settled areas. Such explanations focus
on the drivers of forest change as if they always have the
same momentum and direction in all settings. Further,
these explanations are usually assessed at the national
level, where data quality is often poor, degrees of free-
dom are limited, and confusion exists between correlation
and causality. Rarely are these studies posed at more
appropriate social–ecological system scales. They are less
able to explain when and why forest regrowth takes place
in certain areas within a country, region or landscape, while
other nearby areas are simultaneously being cleared of
their tree cover.
Such explanations also largely ignore institutions and the
powerful capacities of people to organize themselves into
collective groups to combat problems. The approach dis-
cussed here is aimed at achieving a better understanding
of the institutional factors that impact the success or fail-
ure of forest management in different contexts. From the
studies discussed, we find that the official designation of
a forest tenure regime, whether as government, commu-
nity, or co-managed, does not appear to have a consistent
relationship with the direction of forest change. Although
some government forests are successful, others fail –
similarly, some communities are better able to manage
their forests than others. What seems to be more critical
is the legitimacy of ownership, degree of monitoring,
density of forest users and the flexibility to adapt forest
management rules as appropriate to local conditions.
Thus, in Nepal as well as in India, we find communi-
ties engaging in monitoring efforts to successfully manage
forests when ownership is perceived as legitimate and fair.
Traditional, strict public protection of parks can also work
to protect forests. This comes with a high financial cost
however, and appears unsustainable over the long-term as
such measures result in increased conflicts with local
communities. Although it may be a utopian dream to
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assume that national governments will ever cede formal
control of forests to local communities, increasingly, forest
decentralization initiatives are leading to greater roles for
local forest users38. Forest co-management, for instance
as designed in many Nepali park buffer zones26,27, provides
one such approach where within one national park
boundary, different groups of local users manage differ-
ent patches of forest across the periphery, thus assisting
in effective forest recovery. While great care must be
taken in identifying critical stakeholders, and in ensuring
that the poor and disadvantaged do not get left out of this
process, such an approach can provide the greater flexi-
bility required to adapt forest management to local socio–
ecological settings, resulting in more effective, sustain-
able forest conservation over the long term.
Strong institutions can perhaps explain the discrepancy
between the almost complete depletion of forests in many
industrialized nations at the time of the forest transition
(at less than 10% original forest cover remaining), and the
higher levels of original forest cover (between 20 and
50%) observed in many industrializing countries where
forest transitions are taking place9. Despite high levels of
human pressure on forest resources, the maintenance of
long standing tradition of forest protection, and of strong
local institutions in these countries can have significantly
assisted in forest recovery in these countries. This con-
servation of higher levels of primary forest cover in these
countries has significant implications in terms of greater
levels of maintained forest biodiversity39.
It is important to develop better methods for studying
such linked social–ecological systems across multiple
scales, because the impact of relevant variables – such as
population – can differ radically at different scales. The
approach discussed here, using a combination of site-
specific case studies and cross-site comparisons, is very
useful to develop a better theoretical understanding of
critical variables that impact the success or failure of forest
governance as a common-property resource. Some of
these, such as the impact of policy changes or local eco-
logies, may be specific to the context of particular case
studies. Others, such as the role of monitoring on forest
change, may derive from a more fundamental theoretical
basis in human behaviour21. Certain groupings of driving
forces may be local, others regional, and still others may
be found across all contexts.
This article discusses evidence from long-term research
programmes that use research methods that focus at dif-
ferent temporal and spatial scales, and that link empirical
results obtained from multiple methods in field settings to
look at the human drivers of forest cover change in a
range of social–ecological contexts. These approaches are
designed to move beyond the use of single, discipline-
focused research methods which appear inappropriate to
understanding such complex, multiscale processes as forest
change. Approaches such as these, which integrate theo-
ries, methodologies and frameworks from the social and
ecological sciences, appear better suited to derive under-
standings of how individuals in dynamic, complex, social–
ecological settings react to institutional rules and affect
forest conservation. They provide us with a more deve-
loped understanding of the factors that have the potential
to direct the trajectory of forest change towards regrowth,
or further deterioration.
Note
The opportunity to spend an independent period of five
years working on the Society in Science: Branco Weiss
fellowship from 2003 to 2008, gave me the opportunity to
expand the horizons of my work in very fundamental
ways. In addition to a fellowship and research grant that
facilitated putting in place a relatively long-term, inde-
pendent plan of work on forest cover, it gave me the
opportunity of relative freedom from the routine academic
treadmill, with plenty of opportunities to read, think,
reflect and discuss work with other life scientists also
facing the challenges of interdisciplinary research. This
has led to fundamental alterations in the trajectory of my
work, providing an opportunity to engage more deeply
with the social sciences, giving me a chance to think about
and engage with broader issues relating to the study of
drivers of reforestation, devising strategies for putting
together a broader body of work relating to land cover
change in South Asia, and engaging with an urban eco-
logy programme of work in India. All of these have now
become major foci in my work and intellectual interests,
and may well not have been possible to develop the same
degree if it had not been for those much needed years of
generous support.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I thank the numerous local forest users
who assisted with enquiries in various field locations. Financial support
from a Ramanujan Fellowship from Department of Science and Tech-
nology, and from the Society in Science: Branco Weiss Fellowship, as
well as from the National Science Foundation Grant to CIPEC is much
appreciated.