Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico

To organize a comparative inquiry that straddles the fields of comparative politics, historical institutionalism, and policy studies, this book develops a political economy of institutions framework. It shows that differences in structures of political intermediation—venues that help peasant groups and social movements engage in political and policy processes—explain the varying levels of success in combining the pursuits of social justice and environmental conservation.

This book challenges the age-old notion that populist policies produce uniformly deleterious environmental consequences that must be mitigated via centralized systems of environmental regulation. It shows instead that the national leaders and dominant political parties that must compete for popular support in the political arena are more likely to fashion interventions that pursue conservation of forested landscapes without violating the rights of forest-dependent people. Mexico demonstrates the potential for win-win outcomes, India continues to stumble on both environmental and social questions despite longstanding traditions of popular mobilization for forestland rights, and Tanzania’s government has failed its forest-dependent people despite a lucrative wildlife tourism sector. This book’s political analysis of the control over and use of nature opens up new avenues for reflecting on nature in the Anthropocene.

Readers may get more information about the book here https://global.oup.com/academic/product/democracy-in-the-woods-9780190637385 or by contacting Prakash Kashwan at prakash.kashwan@uconn.edu

Prakash Kashwan has a Ph.D. in Public Policy (School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011), and has since been working as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He specializes in the fields of international environmental policy, natural resource management and conservation, and in mixed-methods research. His research has appeared in Ecological Economics, International Journal of the Commons, Land Use Policy, Journal of Environmental Management, and Global Environmental Politics. He has been a CEESP member since 2013.