Between the city and the village: the
differential impact of the predatory and
absentee state on indigenous land rights
and deforestation in Bangladesh and India
Scanlan, Oliver James
(2018)
Between the city and the village: the
differential impact of the predatory and
absentee state on indigenous land rights
and deforestation in Bangladesh and India.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
Smallholders in the Global South are often excluded from their land rights by exclusionary policies of
conservation, which are intensifying in the face of a changing climate. Such conflicts are often the
most problematic where they overlap with the extant political-marginalisation of the smallholder,
articulated in ethnic terms. The world’s Indigenous Peoples, being among the most vulnerable to
dispossession while also tending to inhabit forested spaces, are of central importance to these
debates.
South Asia comprises a “natural laboratory” of different institutional arrangements that mediate the
relationship between the State and the land and forestry rights of Indigenous Peoples. This study
uses ethnographic methods, remote sensing analysis of forest cover change and archival research to
test whether this institutional variation leads to differences in dispossession and deforestation, and
offer conclusions as to why this is the case.
The Garo community inhabits both Meghalaya state in India and the Madhupur region of
Bangladesh, with strong and weak legal protections over lands and forests respectively. The study
finds that dispossession and deforestation outcomes are worse in Bangladesh than in India. This
difference results institutionally from a lack of recognition of the legitimacy of Garo land rights in
Madhupur which in turn stems from the local, ethnically-bounded political-economy, the “Predatory
State”. This comprises an assemblage of local political elites and State bureaucrats for whom both
the Garo smallholding and the original forest represent untapped resources that dispossession
releases into the dominant political-economy.
In contrast, Garo land rights are afforded full legal recognition in Meghalaya, resulting in low levels
of dispossession and a conservation regime that is robust because ownership of protected areas
remains vested in the community. This situation is deteriorating as land values increase, due to an
“Absentee State” that does not provide robust and accessible dispute resolution processes, resulting
institutionally in community rights being only partially embedded in the wider administrative
structure. The main underlying cause is that institutional dysfunction was deliberately designed into
the system to allow the State to “recentralise while decentralising”.