Forest Governance Transitions in Bangladesh
Date
2021-06
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Abstract
Forests are becoming an ever-important centre of focus in the backdrop of climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) in developing countries has become a global approach to combat climate change by making forest carbon as a tradable commodity. Many developing countries like Bangladesh have joined in this bandwagon of REDD+ and currently at various phases of implementation. However, like many other developing countries, the governance situation in the forestry sector has been called into question due to its centralized nature of operation, lack of active participation of the people, and violation of rights of the indigenous people. Also, forest regions have a unique colonial upbringing that aims to exploit the forest for revenue generation by making forest exclusive state property. Due to the diverse origin of forest conservancies in Bangladesh and different historical backdrops and conflicts in the forested regions, a one size fits all policy have remained faulty and weak in addressing such problems. This research aimed to explore the historical origin of forest conservancies in Bangladesh and track down the root causes of the forestry sector's current challenges for decades. The findings suggest that the forested regions have unique sets of challenges and those challenges have roots in the historical development of conservancies. Even after trying for four decades of participatory forestry, peoples participation remained tokenistic. Bangladesh also has been implementing collaborative management in the protected areas of the forests. The findings suggest that due to donor and supply-driven approaches, the collaborative management approach remained weak to address the existing challenges. Moreover, as a state, Bangladesh does not recognize the rights of the indigenous people by not even recognizing them as indigenous and continued to use a derogatory approach of identifying them as “small ethnic minority”. Using a post-structural political ecology approach, this research analyses the discourse of forest policy development involving multi-level actors and found critical concerns remained and must be recognized and negotiated to identify forest region-specific challenges to be more inclusive of the rights of the indigenous people.
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Discourse analysis, Political ecology, Collaborative management, Forest history, Participatory forestry, Governmentality, Environmentality, Indigenous rights, Forest governance
Citation
Siddique, A. (2021). Forest governance transitions in Bangladesh (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.