Revisiting Green Neoliberalism in India through the Lens of Market-Based Restoration and Reforestation Projects

This introduction to the special issue revisits the idea of ‘green neoliberalism’ through the lens of market-based restoration and reforestation projects in India. Addressing the strategic role of forests as ‘carbon sinks’ and ‘service providers’ in today’s neoliberal reform projects, it contributes to a renewed attention to the material production of such (un)desired natures and their variegated realities. It argues that empirical accounts of how the reorganisation of forests is imagined, how it is implemented through specific programmes, and how it gets entangled into the multi-layered histories of people and places, are critical to understand the tensions but also the openings that neoliberal restructuring at the forested frontier entails. First, the article builds on sustained critiques of ‘green neoliberalism’ to retrace changes in global environmental politics over the last 30 years, stamped by the extended reach of the market both outward —through a performative discursive shift and quantification drives— and inward, as it now aims at subjecting practices, habits and emotions to relentless rounds of improving and enhancing. Second, it considers these developments against the background of India’s forest governance since the 1990s, which saw the emergence of the judiciary as a key institution to enforce environmental laws and countertrends to democratizing forest governance. In light of empirical data collected in the special issue, it asks to what degree instruments such as compensatory afforestation or carbon forestry constitute a departure from older forestry projects, and, in fine, the heuristics of neoliberalism as a category, taking issue with the all-powerfulness of India’s State Forest Departments, the long-standing exclusion of local communities, the use of forests as capital for elite bureaucracies, but also the currency and power of the developmental state in India.