Introduction

Environmental conflicts across India have assumed a sharper edge in terms of a fascinating number of scholarships – both theoretical and empirical – and have drawn on long-term contestations around nature. This volume applies a ‘Regional Political Ecology approach’ (hereafter RPE), that can be significant in explaining landscape-based analyzes and the interplay of political, economic and social factors influencing environmental conflicts in the current decades, characterized by newer institutional approaches to environmental governance. RPE aims to transcend representative global framings, which are often applied on local fields poorly positioned to contextualize such broad-based comparative analysis. We feel that a RPE approach is imperative, considering large-scale transformations in the nature of environmental policies in the recent decades and a growing public participation in processes designed towards environmental protection.