Paper forests: imagining and deploying exogenous ecologies in arid India

Debate about the causes and consequences of regional deforestation in India has paved the way for calls to action and intervention, and state-sponsored afforestation has led to government claims of progressagainst land degradation. Census statistics from the arid state of Rajasthan show a tide of forests reclaiming the land. These trends obscure crucial realities that continue to undermine the claims of the state: forest ecosystems continue to disappear, expanding cover is characterized by an ecologically narrow range of species, and forest management remains rooted in a decision structure that fails to educe local knowledge and experience. More fundamentally, the flaws in the Rajasthani forest campaign reflect an entrenched pattern that has long guided authorities in the region; to govern the landscape, the state must quite literally construct forests as mental categories, discursive tropes, and material realities where none have existed before. The material conditions of tree cover are, in this way, influenced by the discursive forms of forest imported into the region. This paper surveys the contradictory trends in Rajasthani land cover, interrogating the relationship between the forests that expand on paper and those that dwindle on the ground. In the process, the paper contributes to ongoing work in post-structural political ecology by asking how discourse matters in the reconstitution of material ecologies and by linking the construction of ecological categories to the formation of landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]