ABSTRACT
Access to minor forest products is governed by hybrid formal and customary laws in Scheduled Areas. In practice, it is also determined by numerous trans-legal factors such as financial capital, social networks, epistemic politics, hierarchies based on intersectionality, and the very materiality of a specific resource. How benefits from a resource accrue to whom depends on a rights-based approach as well as structural and relational mechanisms of access. Yet the large external interventions often seek to and/or have the potential to reconfigure existing benefit allocations, and a thorough understanding of various access mechanisms can throw into relief inadequately nuanced aspects of such interventions that can lead to unintended consequences. We present an accountability analysis approach that can treat these matters conjointly in order to contextualise minor forest product governance within the larger regional political economy. We take up the case of mahua flowers, or matkam, in a Fifth Schedule Area of Jharkhand where Ho communities reside. Alongside a description of its value chain through to use as distilled liquor, we introduce two large interventions that loom on the horizon vis-à-vis compensatory forestry and carbon forestry. Tracking relations of accountability within this multi-scalar and multi-sited resource access assemblage problematises the allocation of benefits extracted from matkam and brings to light a crisis of accountability in governance.
