Pastoral politics: Bureaucratic agendas, shepherd land use practices, and conservation policy in Himachal Pradesh, India, 1865-1994

Recent studies in political ecology have examined conflicts over access to and control over natural resources, primarily in the context of the social and political relations that individual land users are involved in. Within most of these studies the state has been seen as unified in its opposition to local communities, as well as powerful with regard to its capacities to enforce unpopular policies of restriction. This study of pastoralist access to grazing resources contends that the state is not always unified with regard to its objectives, and that divisions within the state may lead to a reduced capacity to control access to grazing lands, and to reduced capacity to manage them successfully.;Based primarily on archival research and semi-structured interviews with shepherds in the state of Himachal Pradesh, in the north Indian Himalaya, I demonstrate three, interconnected phenomenon. First, as a result of agenda-based divisions within the state, including inter-departmental conflicts over primacy of control over forest lands, and constituency-dependent politician undermining of Forest Department functioning, the Forest Department has been largely unsuccessful over the past century-and-a-half, in controlling herder access to state forests. Second, I suggest that the Forest Department's grazing policies lack a reliable empirical basis. And finally, I show that since the 1930s, a particularly alarmist discourse on grazing-induced degradation has come to characterize the Forest Department's conservation rhetoric.;I contend that these three issues are related. I argue here that the large gap between the evidence of the impact of herder grazing on the landscape and the rhetoric of the Forest Department is related to the long-term inability of the Forest Department to reduce herder use of Himachal's forests and the inter-agency conflict over control over Himachal's forest lands. Herder use of forest resources is taking place within the context of highly flexible local institutions of regulation, a flexibility that is expressed at least partly owing to divisions within the state. I argue that analyses of land use practices and conservation policy formulation need to be better located within the context of a disaggregated state.