Rules and Exceptions: Regulatory Challenges to Private Tree Felling in Northern India

By Pushpendra Rana, Ashwini Chhatre
World Development | January 2016

DOI

doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.08.022

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Rana, Pushpendra., Chhatre, Ashwini. Rules and Exceptions: Regulatory Challenges to Private Tree Felling in Northern India World Development doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.08.022.

World Development, 2016

Abstract

Sale of trees from privately owned forest patches is an important source of income for smallholders in developing countries. These private stands are scattered across mixed-use landscapes that include valuable public forests, presenting monitoring and enforcement challenges for state agencies and unique opportunities for traders and farmers to circumvent regulations. We use spatial econometric models and matching methods to show how traders in northern India exploit gaps in regulatory policy, with potential for illegal and pre-mature harvesting of trees. Our findings suggest collusion among traders, large landowners, and local forest officials, especially at higher distances from the location of regulatory offices.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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