Awards and Grants

• Wolfson College of Oxford Fieldwork Grant (2022)
• Oxford Department of International Development Fieldwork Grant (2022)
• IndOx Research Grant (2022)

Whereas most of India’s land conflicts had been about infrastructure and industrialization in the past, conservation has emerged as a novel, stable mode of land dispossession by the State in the era of climate emergency. This project seeks to identify the particular causal mechanism by which State authority becomes entrenched in actors and institutions through the analytic of Dispossession for Conservation (DfC) in the North Indian Himalayan State of Uttarakhand, with two main objectives. First, several new regulations, including the Wildlife and Environmental Protection acts, are proliferating “legitimate” avenues of State action on wildlife and forests, while simultaneously fragmenting interests amongst Adivasis. One particular mode has been through the construction of Eco-Sensitive Zones (ESZs) around tiger reserves, such as Jim Corbett and Rajaji National Parks in Uttarakhand. This project asks, what are the competing claims being made on land in Uttarakhand today? Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I locate tiger rangers as a particular kind of bureaucrat, who may expand, contract, and otherwise shape the boundaries of State authority at the margins through daily rituals related to the enforcement of ESZs. Tiger rangers, in their roles as conservationists, may wield a certain “innocuous” power that enables them to stretch the limits of the State in ways that other bureaucrats may be unable to. Secondly, I use semi-structured interviews to investigate how other bureaucrats react to this power. Present literature has yet to deeply engage with the effects of bureaucracies that are rapidly changing in composition. The regulatory environment of conservation in India has particularly been fragmented, with various National and Subnational agents and consultory NGOs who work on tiger conservation project implementation, and others who represent the “face” of the State. Therefore, this study asks, what do the (in)consistencies between the justifications over the expansion of tiger reserve ESZ's in Uttarakhand between various bureaucratic divisions illuminate about the limits/margins of State authority? I will identify areas where multiple and overlapping jurisdictions over tiger conservation creates spaces of bureaucratic conflict or cooperation, which may re-inscribe or stretch State authority. Potential benefits include strengthening work about the nature of State authority over land and conservation, how strategies could be reformulated to better benefit Adivasi communities while simultaneously protecting wildlife and forests, and whether policy areas of multiple jurisdiction make cooperation more/less difficult between different departments on a policy issue.