ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by adopting a social definition of deforestation, one that links it to the livelihoods of local populations in forested areas. The chapter seeks to explain reorient thinking about deforestation to a focus on multiple users, especially the local resident population and to analyses international and national market trends and policy actions, migration, and land tenure as primary elements of the socioeconomic matrix of deforestation. It aims to emphasize the importance of social dynamics that contribute to deforestation. The “political ecology” approach seeks to take the different levels into account by focusing on key variables that constitute the socioeconomic matrix of deforestation. The socioeconomic matrix is the set of structural conditions that frames decisions to clear forested areas. India has experienced two main eras of deforestation: the first at the turn of the century just after the British took over direct rule, and the second during the 1940s and following independence in 1947.
