The environmentalism of the poor
Environmental conflict in a poor country is a distributional fight over who may use a resource that people live on, not a contest between growth and nature, and the people defending the resource are usually its poorest users.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Sunderlal Bahuguna, Gaura Devi, Ramachandra Guha, Vandana Shiva · Credits and sources ↓
What it says
In March 1973 the villagers of Mandal in Chamoli district stopped a sporting goods firm from felling ash trees the forest department had allotted to it, having themselves been refused the same trees for making farm implements. That refusal is the whole argument in one transaction: the forest was not closed to use, it was closed to their use.
The technique was to embrace the trees, which is what chipko means, and the most cited action came a year later at Reni on 26 March 1974, when Gaura Devi and the women of the village stood between the contractors and the trees after the men had been drawn away to a compensation hearing. In 1980 the central government ordered a fifteen-year stop on green felling above a thousand metres in the Uttarakhand hills.
The movement contained two readings that were never reconciled. Bahuguna's was conservationist: the trees should stand, and ecology is permanent economy. Bhatt's was about livelihood: the forest should be worked, by the people who live in it, for local industry rather than for distant contractors. The international reception heard the first and largely missed the second.
Ramachandra Guha's history put the movement in a longer line, running back through the forest satyagrahas of the 1920s to the moment the colonial state declared the forests its own property under the Indian Forest Act. Read that way, Chipko is a property dispute a century old, and its environmentalism is a consequence of who was being dispossessed rather than a movement's founding motive. Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier later gave the general form a name: the environmentalism of the poor.
Drawn one step at a time
The theory as a graph, revealed a layer at a time. Use the buttons, or the left and right arrow keys. Each step adds the boxes that step introduces and the arrows into them.
- Starting condition
- Mechanism
- Outcome or policy
Four placements, and the reason for each
The four scores are editorial. They run from -3 to +3, they were assigned by the ImpactMojo editorial team from the theory's own texts, and each theory page shows the sentence that justifies its placement so the placement can be argued with. They are a way of arranging a shelf, not a measurement.
Neither the state forest department nor the timber auction. The claim is for common property managed by the people who use it, which is a third arrangement rather than a point between the two.
The distribution of access is the subject. Growth financed by taking a resource from its existing users is what the argument is against.
Gender is central in the Shiva reading and in what actually happened at Reni, since the labour of collecting fuel and fodder is women's. Caste enters through who holds land and who depends on the commons, and the movement's own writing is thinner on this than on gender.
As far towards movements as the shelf goes. The instrument is people physically occupying the site, and the state appears as the party being addressed.
The theory against the record
Each entry takes one claim the theory makes and reports what the evidence says about it, with a named source and a year. This section is the reason the library exists; a catalogue of positions without it is a reading list.
The claim The conflict was about access rather than about conservation.
The founding transaction says so. Mandal's villagers had applied for ash trees for agricultural implements and been refused; the allotment went to a manufacturer from outside the region. Guha's history sets this in a sequence of Himalayan forest protests going back to the 1920s, all of them about use rights, and predating any environmental vocabulary.
Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya · 1989
The claim Movement pressure can change national forest policy.
It did, twice. The felling ban above a thousand metres in 1980 was ordered following the movement, and the Forest Conservation Act of the same year required central clearance to divert forest land, which remains the main statutory brake on forest diversion in India. Both are conservation instruments rather than rights instruments, which is the outcome Bahuguna wanted and Bhatt did not.
Forest (Conservation) Act 1980; Government of India orders on Himalayan felling · 1980
The claim Recognising community rights would follow.
Legislated and then under-delivered. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises individual and community forest rights and makes the gram sabha the authority that decides claims. Implementation has run far behind the eligible area, with community forest rights in particular recognised over a small fraction of the land that qualifies, and rejection rates high and often procedurally improper, as successive government and independent reviews have found.
Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006; Ministry of Tribal Affairs implementation reports · 2006
The claim Local management protects the forest better than state management.
Supported in general and not automatically. Elinor Ostrom's comparative work established that commons governed by their users can be sustained where the users can monitor, exclude outsiders and enforce, and that these conditions are institutional rather than natural. Indian evidence from van panchayats in Uttarakhand and from joint forest management is consistent with this and shows the same conditional pattern: local control works where the local body actually holds the power to exclude, and not where it holds only a consultative role.
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons; and the Indian van panchayat and joint forest management literature · 1990
What this does not settle
The split inside the movement was never settled and it is the live question in Indian forest policy. Conservation and local use are treated as the same cause in most writing about Chipko and they point at different laws: the 1980 Act restricts diversion by making the centre the gatekeeper, and the 2006 Act shifts the decision to the gram sabha, and the two have been in tension in practice ever since. What the record does not tell us is what the hills would look like under the arrangement Bhatt wanted, because forest-based local industry at scale was not tried. The conservation outcome was delivered, and the livelihood outcome was legislated and not delivered.
How it landed here
This is the Indian entry that most changed how environmentalism is defined elsewhere, and the change was to stop assuming that concern for a resource is something people acquire after they are rich. It also sits directly against the growth theories on this shelf, which treat a forest as an input awaiting valuation, and it supplies the missing term in Gandhi and Kumarappa's economy of permanence: not only that extraction is temporary, but that its costs are paid first by the people with the least ability to move away from them.
One that agrees, one that does not
Village swaraj and the economy of permanence
Kumarappa's economy of permanence and the Chipko claim about who the forest is for are the same argument about extraction and who pays for it.
Stabilise, liberalise, privatise
One treats an undervalued resource as a price to be corrected, the other as a set of existing users about to be dispossessed by the correction.
Whose theory this is
Chandi Prasad Bhatt born 1934
Organised the first actions from Gopeshwar through the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh. His reading is about local use: the forest should supply the village workshop before it supplies a sports goods firm in Allahabad.
Sunderlal Bahuguna 1927–2021
Took the argument towards conservation and gave it the slogan that ecology is permanent economy. The difference between his position and Bhatt's is the movement's own internal argument, not a later academic invention.
Gaura Devi 1925–1991
Led the women of Reni village on 26 March 1974 to stand between the contractors and the trees while the men had been drawn away. The action that made the movement known.
Ramachandra Guha born 1958
The historian who placed it in a century of Himalayan forest conflict and argued that reading it as environmentalism first mistakes what the villagers were asking for.
Vandana Shiva born 1952
The feminist reading, which put women's relation to subsistence at the centre and carried the movement into international debate.
What ImpactMojo added
The causal diagram, the four placements and the notes justifying them, and the evidence section: what each claim predicted and what the record shows, with a named source and year for every entry.
ImpactMojo · content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · code MIT
Start with these
- Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989). The history that reframed the movement, with the nineteenth and early twentieth century forest conflicts it grew out of.
- Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1988). The feminist ecological reading, and the book through which Chipko reached international debate.
- Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997). Where the general category, the environmentalism of the poor, is set out and compared across countries.
Open access, in Development Discourses:
- Land Reform, Poverty Reduction, and Growth: Evidence from India — Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess (2000)
- Land Governance Assessment Framework: Implementation Manual for Assessing Governance in the Land Sector — World Bank (2012)
- Smallholders, Food Security, and the Environment — IFAD, UNEP (2013)