After much active negotiation with countries of the North and South, India signed the Convention for Biological Diversity in 1992. The Convention required every member country to formulate its own National Biodiversity Strategy, and Action Plan. In 1999, the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) nominated Kalpavriksh, an NGO long engaged with conservation and environment issues, to coordinate the process. I review the ways in which NGOs, state agencies and activists participated in the preparation of India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) between 1999 and 2004.
Biodiversity is a concept particularly conducive to collaboration—it is an idea that holds interest for both scientists and the wider public. Taking the need for a widely consultative process seriously, Kalpavriksh made special efforts to encourage and solicit participation from a range of actors. They sent out a call for participation in eighteen languages, through both the radio and print media, and nominated over seventy groups to produce as many plans at the state, ecoregional, thematic and substate levels. They also invited experts to present sub-thematic reviews, and constituted a core group that sought participation from a wide range of sectors including different central and state ministries, citizens, and corporate entities. In the words of the MoEF, the NBSAP was ‘India’s biggest environment and development planning process.’
The Power of Structure
From its very inception the core group was mandated to produce a series of planning documents on biodiversity, for which they sought extensive participation. In preparing and formatting this document, power was exercised and consolidated at different levels. Its framing as a planning process for biodiversity determined who would take part and what could be said. The process inherited the contentious history of conservation, and could mobilise only those who saw biodiversity as threatened, and planning as one of the necessary solutions. One person familiar with the NBSAP resented how ‘the very format in which management plans were required – identifying gaps, setting timeframes and monies required’ actually confined participants to a limiting structure. This format did not provide space for discussing the kinds of dynamic processes and activities that others favoured (NBSAP interview, July 2003).
The format of planning itself required a certain set of strategies to be identified, fixed, and written down. Here, state agencies exerted significant pressure. Because their participation was necessary and unavoidable, government agencies exercised a disproportionate amount of influence in determining the final form of the planning document. Much to the chagrin of several participants, officials in state agencies refused to compromise on certain issues, and forced discreet changes in the plan’s language to suit the their offices.
Contradictory Participations
Yet officials in state agencies could not control the NBSAP process entirely. Not all NGOs and activists who participated were equally bound by the demands of state control. The different frameworks, innovativeness, and creativity of these groups introduced a degree of agency and institutional participation, various researchers, and community and NGO activists joined the planning process to make sophisticated critiques of various threats to biodiversity.
While several of the threats and their attendant interventions seemed familiar to conservation practitioners (e.g., park fences for reducing threats from grazing livestock), the plan also identified ‘root causes’ that generally do not get included in plan documents. As a result, the final NBSAP draft, compiled from the different state and regional plans, also contained criticisms of the state itself, including a critique of its chemically driven agricultural development paradigm, and its command-andcontrol forest policy For several participants, engagement in the NBSAP process was contingent and strategic. It was inclusion in the NBSAP process that gave certain groups legitimacy to speak, act and collaborate. As activists, researchers, and state officials developed professional relationships, they frequently took the work of conservation beyond the constraints and demands of this planning effort. Understanding the ultimate implementation of the plan as unlikely, they sought to make it as open and inclusive of their agendas as possible. Activists saw their participation as a temporally limited space within which they could maneuver, and as an opportunity to establish a degree of plurality and creativity within a project of government. By working restively and conditionally with a government planning process, some participants sought to engage tactically to reach particularly defined ends different from those that the state desired.
That this was a precarious and temporary opportunity was soon made very clear by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. First by stalling its completion, then by delaying its confirmation, the Ministry resisted the final draft presented by the Technical and Policy Core Group (TPCG). Then, on 5 October, 2005, it summarily rejected the plan, citing technical inaccuracies as the reason. In doing so, the Ministry went from celebrating the initiative as an example of good governance to calling the document ‘unscientific.’ They proposed to start the entire NBSAP process over again with a different NGO, perhaps with a more diluted version of participation. Kalpavriksh, meanwhile, has made both the process documentation, and the final technical report available to the public.
Originally published as :
Anand, N. 2006. Planning Networks: Processing India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. Conservation and Society 4(3):471-481.
