India’s forests, particularly in coal and other mineral-bearing regions, have been at the centre of many social and environmental conflicts. Such conflicts will likely remain salient over the next decade as India appears to be moving towards greater use of coal instead of transitioning away from it. The current governance architecture in mineral-bearing forested areas is characterized by fragmentation of rights across different stakeholders and a pluralistic institutional regime – a situation often characterized as ‘anticommons.’ ‘Anticommons’ lead to the resource getting gridlocked and underused. The Indian government undertook a critical and ambitious policy design exercise – the ‘Go-No-Go’ or Inviolate Forest Policy (IFP) policy – to address the resource dilemmas by ‘objectively’ demarcating forests for mining and conservation. This paper traces the conflict around the policy formulation as it manifested in the corridors and ministries of the government. We use a novel data source of government records of formal policy deliberations – obtained through India’s transparency law, Right to Information (RTI) – supported by conversations with senior bureaucrats, policymakers, and expert observers. We find that the quest for ‘objective’ demarcation of ‘pristine’ forests for conservation was marked by inter-ministerial conflict, laden with asymmetric power balances and involving the careful deployment of discursive frames and tactical maneuvers. We argue that the multiplicity of use-values that get valued differently a) by different individuals/groups of individuals and b) at different scales inscribe the possibility of conflict at the heart of any attempt to resolve anticommons, as can be seen in the IFP. In the process, we expose the problems in prioritizing amongst competing resource-uses, using ‘efficiency’-based approaches. Further, our analysis presents an implicit critique of the monolithic understanding of the State in the supply of property rights.

中文翻译：

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“Go-No-Go”：印度森林和矿产治理中的反公地和部际冲突

印度的森林，特别是煤炭和其他矿产地区的森林，一直是许多社会和环境冲突的中心。由于印度似乎正在转向更多地使用煤炭而不是放弃煤炭，因此此类冲突可能在未来十年内仍然突出。当前矿产林区治理架构的特点是不同利益相关者的权利分散和多元化的制度体系——这种情况通常被称为“反公地”。“反共有”导致资源陷入僵局和未得到充分利用。印度政府进行了一项关键而雄心勃勃的政策设计活动——“不走”或“不可侵犯森林政策”(IFP)政策——通过“客观”划分森林进行采矿和保护来解决资源困境。本文追溯了在政府走廊和各部委中所体现的围绕政策制定的冲突。我们使用一种新颖的政府正式政策审议记录数据源——通过印度的透明度法、信息权 (RTI) 获得——并得到与高级官僚、政策制定者和专家观察员对话的支持。我们发现，为了保护而对“原始”森林进行“客观”划分的追求以部际冲突为标志，充满了不对称的权力平衡，并涉及谨慎部署话语框架和战术策略。我们认为，使用价值的多样性a）被不同的个人/个人群体以及b）在不同的规模上获得不同的价值，这在任何解决反公地问题的尝试的核心都刻下了冲突的可能性，正如在IFP中可以看到的那样。在此过程中，我们使用基于“效率”的方法暴露了在竞争性资源使用中确定优先级的问题。此外，我们的分析对国家在产权供给方面的单一理解提出了隐含的批评。