ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the Forest Departments in Jharkhand and West Bengal have worked with village communities to achieve participation in forest management. It discusses the policy framework that the departments have adopted towards forest management and introduces the settings in the villages where the research was carried out. The chapter deals with a discussion of the scale and quality of Joint Forest Management (JFM) efforts in West Bengal. It argues that the concentration of a number of JFM committees in southwest Bengal betrays a target-oriented approach by the department to raise the percentage of forest cover in deforested parts of the State. The chapter also analyzes how the Forest Departments have performed in each State vis-a-vis three key parameters of JFM: registration of villages under the JFM agreement, sharing responsibility for the protection of forests, and distribution of usufruct and benefits.
