2. Beyond Anthropocene thinking and Chipko imaginaries: framework and methods

THED critiques unsettled the preoccupation with ‘degradation’ from neo-Malthusian perspectives in Himalayan forest governance. Critical research foregrounded the value of open grassland systems and the centrality of adaptive agro-pastoral strategies, exposing the fallacies of expert-led policymaking and knowledge production centred on trees and ‘forest cover’ (Blaikie & Muldavin, Reference Blaikie and Muldavin2004; Davis & Robbins, Reference Davis and Robbins2018). Building on these critiques, recent scholarship situates environmental change within histories of colonial capitalism, securitisation, and market-led extractivism, drawing attention to how structural socio-ecological injustices are rendered invisible within dominant climate frameworks (Kashwan, Reference Kashwan2016; Ribot, Reference Ribot, Mearns and Norton2010; Sultana, Reference Sultana2022).

These critiques intersect with analyses of postcolonial forest governance that reframed forest-dependent communities as partners in conservation through JFM. Financed by international agencies and articulated in the language of participation, this ‘progressive turn’ was marked by exaggerated claims while concealing on-ground failures (Agarwal, Reference Agarwal2009; Chhatre, Reference Chhatre2000; Gouri et al., Reference Gouri, Morrison and Mayers2004; Vasan, Reference Vasan2001). Bureaucratic and centralised JFM interventions reproduced top-down control, perpetuated inequities in forest access, and sidestepped longer histories of accumulation by dispossession and the absence of legal ownership – longstanding points of contention in forested regions of India (Sarin, Reference Sarin1995). Forest policies also drew from imaginaries forged in the decades after the Chipko movement. The iconic figure of women hugging a deodar tree continues to signify a timeless relationship between ‘Himalayan women’ and the forest and is routinely mobilised in bureaucratic accounts of ‘community participation’ across the Himalaya and beyond. While Chipko represented a historically situated political struggle against state extraction, its depoliticised afterlife enables the enrolment of women into conservation and restoration as culturally predisposed caretakers (Rangan, Reference Rangan2000). Such representations naturalise participation while obscuring patriarchy embedded within forest governance.

FPE forms the primary analytical framework for this study, foregrounding the relationships between knowledge, labour, power, and resource governance. Rather than treating women’s participation as an expression of innate environmentalism, FPE interrogates how gender is produced within resource regimes, how environmental authority is distributed, and how agency emerges through historically and materially situated socio-ecological relations (Elias et al., Reference Elias, Joshi and Meinzen-dick2021). Agarwal’s (Reference Agarwal2010) work demonstrates that participation in forest governance is structured by property relations, livelihood responsibilities, and institutional arrangements rather than moral or cultural narratives. In this reading, agency is relational and uneven, emerging within differentiated terrains of access, rights, and labour. Complementing this, Massey’s (Reference Massey1994) relational understanding of space and place highlights forests and commons as dynamic socio-ecological landscapes continually produced through mobility, state regulation, market integration, and ecological change.

Environmental history and political ecology scholarship from the Himalaya further grounds this analysis. Gururani’s work demonstrates how colonial forestry, land classification, and postcolonial development produced forests as governable territories through enclosure, bureaucratic abstraction, and exclusion. These processes entrenched social differentiation and patriarchal authority while rendering customary practices, agroforestry systems, and open grassland ecologies illegible within dominant conservation frameworks. Together, these perspectives challenge static and essentialist readings of women’s participation and situate gendered environmental action within historically layered landscapes of power (Gururani, Reference Gururani2014).

This scholarship shows how technocratic participation often reproduces patriarchal and colonial hierarchies by extracting unpaid labour, marginalising situated knowledge, and centralising decision-making within bureaucratic and donor-driven structures. Recent work shows how contemporary restoration and adaptation interventions – framed through climate finance, carbon forestry, and nature-based solutions – reinscribe older logics of control and dispossession under the language of sustainability (Asiyanbi & Massarella, Reference Asiyanbi and Massarella2020; Kashwan, Reference Kashwan2016; Mikulewicz, Reference Mikulewicz2020; Nightingale et al., Reference Nightingale, Eriksen, Taylor, Forsyth, Pelling, Newsham, Boyd, Brown, Harvey, Jones, Bezner Kerr, Mehta, Naess, Ockwell, Scoones, Tanner and Whitfield2020; Sultana, Reference Sultana2022).

This study builds upon these critiques to examine how restoration and conservation governance in the trans-Himalayan region of Lahaul operates through selective invocations of women’s participation. We adopt a qualitative, ethnographic approach grounded in feminist political ecology, environmental history, and climate justice scholarship, emphasising lived experience, relational knowledge, and collective meaning-making (Joshi, Reference Joshi2014). Fieldwork was conducted across the Chandra, Bhaga, and Patan sub-valleys of Lahaul between 2021 and 2022, with follow-up visits between 2023 and 2025 (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Map of the field research area of Lahaul valley, Himachal Pradesh.

Methods included participant observation, transect walks, and village visits during both agricultural and winter seasons. Initial focus group discussions (FGDs) with 20 mahila mandals were followed by semi-structured interviews with women elders, youth, pastoralists, cultivators, and village representatives (spread across three sub-valleys), alongside informal conversations with three forest officials. Desk-based research complemented fieldwork through analysis of forest working plans, government notifications, project reports produced by International Financial Institutions and development agencies, and documents obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Long-term involvement in the region enabled open discussions on sensitive issues such as gendered labour, differentiated access to forests, historical experiences of enclosure, and concerns around the slow and uneven implementation of the FRA within contemporary conservation and restoration frameworks. Research questions evolved iteratively through sustained conversations that were also part of the production of a documentary film.

The study ultimately centred on the following questions: How have historical and contemporary forest governance regimes reshaped livelihood–forest relationships? How do mahila mandals regulate and negotiate forest use, and under what conditions do these practices emerge? What forms of authority and conflict arise within these processes? How are state-led and donor-driven restoration interventions experienced and contested by different groups, particularly women?

We write this paper as researcher–activists who are not native to the valley and recognise our caste–class privilege and access to academic, legal, and policy networks that shape how we understand and articulate these issues. Our perspectives are informed by more than a decade and a half of embedded solidarity work on environmental justice issues in Himachal Pradesh. Our relationship with Lahaul began in 2011 through support to Save Lahaul Spiti’s grassroots activists working to protect their landscapes and livelihoods and has since developed into long-term collaborations with community-based organisations and proactive youth, shaped through proximity, trust, and everyday interaction. We remain attentive to the fact that such proximity does not erase our privilege.

The work is grounded in a commitment to socio-environmental and epistemic justice. Research is approached as a political practice that, instead of reproducing extractive knowledge relations, contributes to challenging power through solidarity. Ongoing involvement in supporting awareness of the FRA, facilitating tenurial claims, and strengthening democratic participation in environmental decision-making shapes both the motivations and ethical grounding of this study, even as we continue to reflect on the limits, responsibilities, and consequences of this engagement.

3. Lahaul: mobility and socio-ecological transitions

Set in the arid north-western Himalayan Pir Panjal and Zanskar ranges, the Lahaul Valley has long been characterised as a ‘forbidden’ or ‘remote mystery land’, cut off from the world by snowed-out passes (Bajpai, Reference Bajpai1987; Sahni, Reference Sahni1994). Until the Rohtang (Atal) Tunnel connected the Kullu and Lahaul-Spiti districts, the region remained inaccessible by road for most of the year given intense winter snowfall (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

North portal of the Atal Tunnel that has set off new developments in the Lahaul Valley.

Figure 2 Long description

The Atal Tunnel, opened in 2020 beneath the Rohtang Pass, is a 9.02-km highway tunnel connecting Manali with Lahaul. Built to provide year-round connectivity, it has also accelerated tourism, infrastructure expansion, and new pressures on the Trans-Himalayan cold desert landscape of the region, ushering in new socio-ecological transformations.

Not far from the tunnel, in Shooling village, we asked 104-year-old Tashi Palzom (who passed away shortly after we met her in July 2021) whether she had travelled through it yet. She narrated the legend from the Mahabharat where Kunti stopped Bhim from carving out a pass, for the joining of Lahaul and Kullu that would bring disaster. She then added, ‘I crossed the Rohtang pass on foot. We used to make grass footwear then – at least three to four pairs for the journey – wear and throw. I remember going to the Red Fort in Delhi.’

A Buddhist elder recounting a Hindu mythological tale underscores the long-standing cultural entanglements in a valley where Buddhist and Hindu traditions, spread across distinct sub-valleys – the Chandra, Bhaga, and lower Chenab (Chandrabhaga). Lahaul’s landscape comprises alpine pastures, riverine terraces, and forest edges, once linked through circuits of trade and transhumance sustained by kinship networks and a strong ethic of resource sharing essential for survival in harsh conditions. Seasonal mobility and winter survival historically connected Lahaul with Ladakh, Kullu, Chamba, and the plains, producing socio-ecological relations structured as much by circulation and exchange as by physical separation.

Historian Chetan Singh describes these regions adjoining the Tibetan Plateau as ‘transitory zones’ – socio-cultural and political thresholds shaped by mobility rather than remoteness (Singh, Reference Singh2018). Accounts like Palzom’s reveal a lived geography of mobility and ecological familiarity, complicating mainstream portrayals of Lahaul as isolated. They sit within a wider socio-ecological history structured by the valley’s distinctive ‘verticality’, arising from varied altitudinal zones that enabled multiple livelihoods – trade, labour, transhumant pastoralism – sustained by kinship networks and a strong ethic of resource sharing essential for survival in harsh conditions (Pande, Reference Pande2015).

Padma Namgyal from Billing recalled: ‘Not very long ago every family had 50 to 60 sheep! Women would walk up in the evening to the pasture where our shed was, to milk the cattle, make ghee, yoghurt, and stay the night. They would sing and dance all night or walk back with kilta (basket) of manure.’ Mobility was thus embodied and central to ecological knowledge, not confined to men or exceptional journeys but rather embedded in everyday life and care work. Women – now constituting over 70 per cent of recorded cultivators – have historically remained central to agricultural production and household reproduction, though within patriarchal social structures (Bhattacharya, Reference Bhattacharya2017; Department of Industries, Government of Himachal Pradesh, 2024). Familial customs such as fraternal polyandry historically facilitated labour pooling and limited fragmentation of landholdings among landed groups, enabling households to sustain multiple agro-pastoral and trading activities within compressed seasonal cycles.

The formation of what is now cast as ‘Lahauli Indigeneity’ – nested within a nationalist identity and defined by shared geography, customary practices, linguistic continuity, and a semi-agrarian, nomadic way of life (Tobdan & Dorje, Reference Dorje2008) – emerged through these layered histories of mobility and exchange. Yet this indigeneity has never been socially homogeneous, complicating reductive narratives of tribal cohesion that obscure unequal social relations around land, labour, and status (Dhissa, Reference Dhissa2011). Even then, these interwoven systems of mobility, collective labour, and reciprocal resource use formed the socio-ecological basis of Lahauli life, which would later be reshaped through processes of territorialisation and enclosure.

The shift away from agro-pastoralism, particularly in the upper valleys, unfolded through broader postcolonial transitions, the most significant being the region’s incorporation as a tribal district under the Constitution soon after Independence. State-led development policies centred on education, job reservations and commercial agriculture gradually reshaped land-labour relations and socio-cultural subjectivities across the valley.

Over time, mobility became increasingly defined by selective household migration to neighbouring Kullu and urban centres in pursuit of education, healthcare, and livelihood opportunities. Elderly family members and women often continued to sustain agricultural and livestock work within the valley even as younger generations moved out. As an elderly woman in Toche village remarked, ‘Now even the daughters-in-law move out to Kullu-Manali after marriage’, pointing to the shrinking labour available for household and agro-pastoral work.

The contemporary Lahauli economy is also shaped by migrant Nepali labour in commercial farming, by Gaddi pastoralists who still graze their flocks in the valley each summer, and by deepening linkages with neighbouring Kullu. With increased purchasing power, the region has also seen a shift towards market-based energy substitutes, including timber, construction materials for concrete housing, and subsidised LPG and fuelwood. These shifts did not displace dependence on forests but reworked it within a cash-intensive agrarian economy, where market access, wage labour, and state subsidies coexist with continued reliance on commons for agriculture, socio-cultural practices, and everyday living, especially in the lower parts of the Chandrabhaga basin (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

A woman tends to her cabbage field in the valley.

Figure 3 Long description

Off-season vegetable farming has emerged as the mainstay of Lahaul’s cash-crop economy reshaping land-use and labour relations. Here too women play a central role in cultivation and the everyday labour that sustains this market-oriented agriculture.

Cooperative action has remained a defining feature of Lahauli society through these postcolonial transitions. Literate members mobilised new networks not only to integrate into broader agricultural markets and technologies but also to overcome geographical disadvantages, secure collective benefits, and resist exploitation by intermediaries. Institutions such as the Lahaul Potato Growers Cooperative Society and the Kuth Cooperative Society emerged during this period of postcolonial transition (Baumann & Singh, Reference Baumann and Singh2000).

Despite periodic disruptions over the last two centuries, the valley, which sustains a semblance of state-market integration alongside a remarkable degree of cultural continuity, now faces unprecedented environmental challenges. These challenges range from shrinking snow cover and growing climate risks to rapid infrastructure development driven by geopolitical compulsions (Choubey, Reference Choubey2025; Singhal et al., Reference Singhal, Kavya and Jha2025). Lahaul’s proximity to militarised borders of Jammu-Kashmir and Ladakh and location on the Sino-Indian boundary, drove the construction of the 9-kilometre Atal Tunnel (Thakur & Sabhlok, Reference Thakur and Sabhlok2022). With this connectivity, what began as a moderate tourist flurry has turned into a deluge, with thousands of vehicles choking the upper valley during peak seasons, accompanied by mounting garbage and acute shortages in boarding infrastructure.

Amid these overlapping transitions and pressures, forests and commons in Lahaul are increasingly sites through which questions of territorial control, ecological protection, livelihood security, and local authority are being negotiated (Anand et al., Reference Anand, Gohain, Kaul and Mukherjee2024; Devine & Baca, Reference Devine and Baca2020).

4. Forest enclosures and shifting commons relations

One of the critical yet obfuscated drivers of Lahaul’s socio-ecological transformations has been the long arc of environmental governmentality, beginning under colonial rule, when landscapes of mobility were gradually fixed through classification and enclosure and deepening in the postcolonial period. The official process of recording forests in Lahaul – into Reserved and Protected categories – began under imperial rule in 1844 and continued until 1912 (Anderson, Reference Anderson1886), when it was part of the Punjab Hill States. A substantive portion of glaciers, snow-covered areas, alpine pastures, and dhars (ridges) with sparse tree cover spread over six lakh hectares was classified as Undemarcated Protected Forests (UPF) (Panday, Reference Panday1993). This early administrative bundling of glacial, pastoral, and sparsely treed landscapes under a single forest category regulated customary access to grazing, fuelwood, leaf litter, timber, agricultural wood, rights of way, and water sources – with stricter controls in Reserved Forests – and established the jurisdictional precedent through which post-Independence policy would bring extensive areas under Forest Department control without adequate settlement of customary rights. It also produced a lasting ambiguity between forest as tree cover and forest as a wider governed landscape, an ambiguity that continues to shape contemporary conservation and restoration interventions. The Forest Department working plan for the region characterises Lahaul’s forests as ‘poorly managed’ under ‘vague rules’, with ‘illicit felling, unrestricted grazing, encroachments on government lands’, resulting in deteriorated forests. Ironically, it also acknowledges that the colonial Timber Development Agency followed a ‘cut out and get out’ policy from 1852 for thirty years, revealing how state extraction – not community use – drove early forest loss (Panday, Reference Panday1993). While colonial categories established an administrative scaffolding, the post-Independence period dramatically expanded the scope of state authority over forests. After the 1952 National Forest Policy encouraged mountain states to legally classify large proportions of land as state-owned forest in the interest of protecting ‘national assets’, Himachal Pradesh brought extensive ‘wastelands’ under Forest Department control. In Lahaul and Spiti today, over 90 percent of the geographical area falls under the jurisdiction of forest laws and the Forest Department.

Among the most contentious restrictions imposed were the regulation of timber distribution (TD) for domestic construction and the prohibition on breaking new land (nautor), a recorded customary practice, in UPF areas for cultivation or habitation. These restrictions intensified through the Forest Conservation Act (1980), the Green Felling Ban (1988), and subsequent judicial rulings, further restricting domestic use and land-use change (Chowdhury, Reference Chowdhury2014; Thayyil, Reference Thayyil2009). As Rigzin Hayerapa, a Forest Rights activist from Kwaring, explains: ‘During the land reforms and the 1968 Nautor Rules, the State recognised that for a dignified life a family needs at least 20 bighas of land. But look at Lahaul—close to 70% of the farmers have a land holding of only 5 to 10 bighas. After the Forest Conservation Act halting diversion for nautor cases in 1982, occupations for habitations and agriculture came to be treated as “encroachments” on forest land.’

Households with larger landholdings and access to state employment were better positioned to adapt to changing economic conditions, while Scheduled Tribe Dalits and marginal cultivators remained more dependent on commons and customary occupations – exclusions that are often obscured within broader narratives of marginalisation. Changes in forest access also disrupted older reciprocal systems that linked villages across ecological zones through negotiated arrangements of grazing, irrigation, timber access, and seasonal mobility. Residents in Billing recalled earlier agreements with Kardang village where access to kail (blue pine) forests was exchanged for grazing rights and irrigation support, systems which gradually weakened with increasing administrative regulation and concretised irrigation channels.

These shifts unfolded alongside changes in local resource systems and adaptive strategies. For instance, with restricted forest access, communities expanded forms of traditional agroforestry and negotiated new arrangements around fuel, fodder, and timber. In many parts of the valley, willow plantations around agricultural fields emerged over the last one-and-a-half to two centuries as a crucial adaptation that supplemented shrinking access to forests while continuing to sustain household energy and livestock needs. However, a fungal disease affecting preferred willow varieties over the last decade has generated growing anxieties around fuelwood availability, particularly alongside expanding tourism economies in the upper valleys (Rawat & Everson, Reference Rawat and Everson2012) (Figure 4). Kamla Thakur from Shooling narrated: ‘Our family came from Patan Valley and bought land here (Shooling in Chandra Valley) in 1956. My father first planted willow over 10–15 bighas of forest land. Earlier, we accessed the reserved and protected forest across the Chandra River but then the area was fenced by the Forest Department. Now we can only pick fallen wood. We used to graze our animals earlier on the other side too but that was restricted by the forest guards. Fines were imposed. Now people have sold off their sheep and goats.’

Figure 4.

A willow patch with dead and decaying trees.

Figure 4 Long description

Willow agroforestry has been practised in Lahaul for around 150 years, with willow plantations established around agricultural fields providing fuelwood, fodder and timber, while integrating closely with farming livelihoods. Today, willow remains one of the more locally adapted forms of agroforestry in the valley, though disease and changing livelihood patterns are creating new uncertainties.

These transformations weakened reciprocal arrangements that sustained vertical and seasonal livelihood systems, while state policy increasingly sought to reorganise dependence on the commons through subsidised alternatives, market integration, and infrastructural expansion. A senior Forest official we interviewed in Keylong confirmed that the department’s strategy in the Lahaul Valley remains one of ‘reducing people’s dependence on forest land’ by offering alternative, imported sources of fuel and timber at subsidised rates. That the Forest Department’s fuelwood depots were created to fulfil official needs – rather than community needs – emerged clearly in a focused group discussion. Elders recalled that during the establishment of the district administration in Keylong, there was a sudden rise in demand for timber for construction and fuel for heating to support government employees residing in the valley. This, in turn, led to increased sales and theft of local timber and fuelwood, often enabled through collusion with forest officials.

Mahila mandals – especially in the Chandra and Bhaga valleys – cite this surge in thefts, which thinned the juniper forests, as one of the key reasons behind the initiation of self-regulatory measures in forest use during the 1980s. As one leader of the Mooling Mahila Mandal stated emphatically: ‘While we were impacted by the TD ban, we were also relieved in a way, because the department would sanction one tree and four others would be chopped down. When they imposed restrictions, we chose to take it a step further and imposed our own restrictions on other uses too.’

Allowing forests to regenerate was seen to have another critical benefit, especially after deadly avalanches struck various parts of the valley in 1979. Communities increasingly viewed juniper forests as barriers that could protect settlements located below them. While the origin of this idea is unclear, the collective memory of the 1979 avalanche was frequently invoked by women and elders in conversations about protection strategies and juniper harvesting. The cultural and spiritual value of Shukpa (juniper) revered and used as incense in daily rituals and festivals – strengthened protection practices. Women across the valley, beginning in Kwaring and Stingri villages of the Bhaga sub-valley, articulated this sentiment consistently (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

A protected juniper forest near Billing in the Bhaga valley of Lahaul.

The shift to cash crops, the use of LPG and electric heaters, and the purchase of market-sourced timber enabled many of these protection measures to take root and expand to other villages. Yet women repeatedly emphasised the persisting forest dependencies: livestock grazing, collection of medicinal plants, fuelwood, fodder, and leaf litter (for composting and mulching in farms), which serve as the basis for self-regulation and evolving local systems of resource distribution. Environmental governmentality in Lahaul has thus operated not only through conservation logics and rules alone but also through the restructuring of livelihoods, markets, and state expenditure. These processes increasingly placed mahila mandals’ everyday labour, vigilance, and ethical claims at the centre of local forest governance.

5. Women’s collective agency, knowledge hierarchies, and geographies of unequal labour

In Jasrath village in the Patan Valley, women captured these shifting relationships with forests succinctly: ‘modern zamane ki dadi ke haath mein kainchi pakda diya’ [in modern times, the grandmother’s hands were given scissors]. The phrase reflected a movement away from the sickle associated with everyday agro-pastoral use towards scissors associated with protection and regulation. Practices such as Shukpa protection were framed not only as ecological responsibilities but also as forms of care tied to culture and social norms. During participant observation, scissors also appeared as symbolic objects in moments of filming and documentation, reflecting how conservation increasingly becomes a visible performance of environmental stewardship and prompting reflection on the researcher’s role in reproducing such representations.

Established across India as part of rural development programmes in the 1990s, mahila mandals are registered village organisations through which women ‘produce a collective identity’ (Berry, Reference Berry2001). In Lahaul, this collective identity, while differentiated by caste and class, is also shaped by tribal status, shared socio-cultural histories, and livelihood dependencies. Women act collectively on a wide range of familial, social, and political matters, drawing on roles deeply embedded in social reproduction that shape the local economy and polity and provide spaces for leadership. Frequently mobilised to advance community and state interests, mahila mandals are also viewed as channels for political messaging. Yet reducing them to state-driven institutions obscures their lived complexities and everyday forms of negotiation.

Despite meagre state funding, our FGDs revealed mahila mandals to be active and materially sustained institutions. Women regularly convene in Mahila Mandal Bhavans equipped with tandoors and community kitchens, which are largely maintained through local contributions of labour and money. During disasters, these collectives support rescue and relief operations, particularly when tourists become stranded. At the same time, members expressed frustration over the expanding labour burdens associated with safai abhiyans (cleanliness drives), commercial vegetable cultivation, eco-tourism, and forest regulation work coordinated through these collectives (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Women of the Mooling Mahila Mandal take a break in their forest.

Figure 6 Long description

Women in Mooling helped establish and enforce restrictions on fuelwood, leaf litter and juniper (Shukpa) collection, including seasonal rules and patrolling. Their experience illustrates both the agency and the burdens of community-led protection and regeneration: women undertake much of the everyday labour of protection while negotiating conflicts among forest users and with state institutions.

In villages facing high avalanche risk and scarce forest resources, mahila mandals, together with village assemblies, formulated operational rules governing forest access and use. These included restrictions on fuelwood lopping except during collectively designated periods in October, ‘when the forests are declared open after proper meetings’. Similar regulations applied to leaf litter and Shukpa collection. ‘When we started, restraint had to be exercised by the villagers themselves before expecting outsiders to stop’, explained one participant from Mooling village. Compliance was enforced through patrolling, fines of up to ₹5,000, and, when necessary, support from the Forest Department. Since the rules were framed as ‘sabke liye barabar’ (equal for all), questions of differentiated dependence were often overlooked, disproportionately affecting Dalit households and others more reliant on the commons.

This emerging environmentality also disrupted older inter-village resource-sharing arrangements and brought women into conflict with one another as forest users, regulators, and workers. In discussions across Kwaring, Stingri, Billing, and Mooling, participants spoke candidly about these tensions while recalling customary knowledge of territorial boundaries and earlier exchange systems between villages. In Hinsa, women described confrontations with village men during night patrols, calling it a ‘khajjal hone wala kaam’ (frustrating task). Discussions in Kwaring and Mooling repeatedly returned to a shared frustration: ‘We are the ones guarding the forest, while the Forest Department gets the salaries.’ As one forest guard candidly admitted: ‘In winter, the Forest Department is on leave. If the mahila mandal steps back, officials won’t be able to do anything. We have a 25 km beat to patrol.’

Women frequently contrasted locally evolved systems of regulation and regeneration – including willow-based agroforestry and juniper protection – with successive state – and donor-supported afforestation programmes. The Desert Development Programme (DDP), launched in 1977–1978 to ‘minimise desertification and rejuvenate natural resources’, exemplifies these shortcomings. Official audits reveal that nearly 85 per cent of allocated funds remained unspent due to staff shortages, lack of technical expertise, and the absence of action plans (Comptroller and Auditor General of India, 2014). Reflecting popular disillusionment, a Lahauli leader remarked that the DDP was mockingly referred to as ‘daily dat ke piyo’ – drink to death every day.

Afforestation expanded further from the late 1990s through JFM, under which Village Forest Development Societies (VFDSs) were constituted at the village and hamlet levels. While presented as participatory institutions, mahila mandals reported limited awareness of VFDS operations, except through women’s involvement as daily-wage plantation labour. Decision-making remained concentrated with lower-rung forest officials and male village representatives (Shylendra, Reference Shylendra2015). In villages where mahila mandals were already engaged in forest protection, JFM drew upon women’s existing labour without corresponding authority or recognition. More broadly, plantation-based enclosures further restricted access and reciprocal use already being transformed by wider economic and livelihood shifts, adding to women’s burdens of protection and conflict management.

Women’s accounts also revealed how forest enclosures altered relationships of use, care, and authority across the landscape. Household-managed agroforestry plots, where use and maintenance rights were clearly understood, were distinguished from collectively regulated forests and plantation sites perceived as having been ‘taken over’ by or ‘handed over’ to the department. These territorial shifts accompanied afforestation at a considerable scale, which continued over the last few decades. Forest Department records, No. 8134, 31 January 2022, indicate that between 2010 and 2020, 18.5 lakh saplings across 13 species were planted in Keylong and Udaipur divisions, including blue pine, cedar, willow, apricot, sea buckthorn, and non-native poplars and Robinia.

Aside from willow, confidence in plantation outcomes remained low, and poor survival rates were widely reported in areas lacking irrigation or community involvement in planning and maintenance. As the President of the Shooling Mahila Mandal explained, ‘In this dry landscape, saplings require a lot of care – water and manure. Access to the site matters. If it’s far from the village, it’s difficult for people to participate.’ An elder from the same Panchayat recalled villagers fining a forest guard for improper pruning of willow trees, arguing that accountability must be mutual: ‘When the State holds people accountable and the public holds the State accountable, only then will such measures succeed.’ As a Gaddi pastoralist travelling seasonally through Lahaul lamented, ‘This is the worst profession to be in… They just fence out areas for plantations. Most places don’t even have saplings surviving. Our occupation cannot survive anymore.’ (Figure 7). These experiences align with broader evidence documenting the inefficacy of afforestation and compensatory plantation schemes across the Western Himalaya (Asher & Bhandari, Reference Asher and Bhandari2021; Fleischman et al., Reference Fleischman, Rana, Fischer, Guleria, Rana and Ramprasad2025; Iype et al., Reference Iype, Suryawanshi and Khanyari2025; Rana et al., Reference Rana, Fleischman, Ramprasad and Lee2022).

Figure 7.

A Gaddi shepherd in the Miyar valley grazing his stock.

Although Forest Department officials now claim that plantations along pastoral routes are discouraged and no longer prioritised in trans-Himalayan ecosystems, afforestation continues under the ₹800-crore Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)-funded livelihoods programme initiated in 2018, under which over one lakh trees were planted in the first phase. The project retains VFDSs as its principal village-level institutions for implementing plantation and livelihood activities, but within an institutional architecture dominated by the Forest Department (Figure 8). VFDSs have token representation (of one member) on the Divisional Management Unit but no say in higher-level planning, while financial authority remains largely centralised (Himachal Pradesh Forest Department, 2018).

Figure 8.

The Forest Department nursery at Sissu under the JICA project.

In Lahaul, VFDSs operate at the ward level on small project-defined plots, while land ownership and customary rights sit at the revenue-village level. Mahila mandals, despite their established role in forest protection in several villages, do not necessarily recognise VFDSs as forest governance institutions, although they are familiar with the JICA Pradhan – typically a male figure associated with project implementation (Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 2018). This raises questions about representation and whose consent counts in decisions over particular forest landscapes. In Teling village, for instance, we encountered departmental plantations on forest lands undertaken without the consent of customary users, potentially infringing upon their rights.

The expansion of donor-driven conservation through the Forest Department’s bureaucratic apparatus has further intensified exclusions. The region lies within the buffer zones of two wildlife sanctuaries and a newly notified Snow Leopard Conservation Reserve, yet communities remain largely uninformed about spatial boundaries, access rules, and long-term implications. Under UNDP’s 72-million-dollar SECURE Himalaya project, conservation is articulated through the language of climate-compatible livelihoods and biodiversity protection but operationalised through expert-led biodiversity studies rather than engagement with everyday vulnerabilities. Agro-pastoral practices are framed as ‘unsustainable’ drivers of habitat degradation, reviving fortress conservation logics that position local communities as threats rather than knowledge-holders.

Rising wildlife conflict – snow leopards and Himalayan brown bears preying on livestock and crops – has compounded livelihood stress, while mitigation techniques like solar fencing were reported ineffective (Hussain, Reference Hussain2019; Zoological Survey of India, 2021). Women’s responses to livelihood diversification initiatives were ambivalent. Some participated in knitting and sea buckthorn-based enterprises, including a women-led initiative in Miyar valley, while questioning their viability beyond project support. Others described schemes of sea buckthorn plantation as jhanjhat (troublesome), citing labour-intensive work, limited remuneration, uncertain markets, and sales largely confined to sponsored exhibitions (Figure 9).

Figure 9.

Sea buckthorn in Miyar valley, being promoted by agencies as a lucrative livelihood option.

Figure 9 Long description

In Miyar, women have experimented with value-added products such as sea-buckthorn juice, but these initiatives remain dependent on project support rather than developing into self-sustaining enterprises. Women’s experiences, however, reveal the limits of this promise: harvesting is labour-intensive, returns remain uncertain, markets are limited, and sales are often tied to project-sponsored exhibitions rather than sustained demand.

At the same time, conservation interventions remain conspicuously silent on pressing climate vulnerabilities such as recurrent flash floods, avalanches, land subsidence, hydropower dams, and tourism infrastructures in a seismically active landscape. Rehabilitation of villages such as Changut and Lindur, devastated by floods and subsidence, requires diversion of classified forest land, remain out of the purview of these projects of the Forest Department (Figure 10). Both UNDP and JICA reference the FRA 2006 in their strategy documents, yet evade engagement with its implementation.

Figure 10.

Lindur village near the Jahlma nallah, facing severe land subsidence.

Figure 10 Long description

Recent extreme events in Lahaul, including flash floods, avalanches and land subsidence, have intensified socio-ecological vulnerabilities across the valley. Villages such as Changut and Lindur have faced displacement and loss of land, while damage to infrastructure and agricultural land has exposed the limits of adaptation strategies that focus narrowly on livelihoods without addressing land tenure, rehabilitation, and changing climate risks.

In discussions in Tindi village, residents explained: ‘The Border Roads Organisation’s massive set-up takes wood from our forests for construction. If we cut fuelwood, we are immediately fined.’ They further described evictions from lands occupied since 1975, despite eligibility for claims under the FRA, alongside restrictions on collecting fuelwood and medicinal plants, even as contractors extracted forest resources at scale. These accounts reveal a deeper contradiction within contemporary conservation. While projects seek to reduce local ‘dependence’ on forests through subsidies and market substitutes, democratic claims over land and the commons remain constrained where they challenge the political economy of green growth. Communities are cast as encroachers when they use classified forest land for their livelihoods, yet excluded as the same landscapes are enclosed for plantations, conservation reserves, or carbon projects. Forest Department officials frequently dismissed FRA claims by invoking concerns over encroachment, existing fuelwood subsidies, and declining dependence on forests. Yet the findings presented here complicate these justifications.

Women’s collective agency also extends beyond forest protection and project-defined participation into contestations over hydropower and tourism development, drawing on lived experiences of extreme weather, displacement, cultural erosion, and livelihood insecurity. During the course of this study, we encountered women opposing the use of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) for tourism on grazing grounds and sacred sites. This struggle brought them into conflict not only with the local administration but also with tourism operators from within the community who had invested capital. When the Sissu Mahila Mandal attempted to invoke the authority of local bodies to pass resolutions against the venture, they were brushed aside by a powerful regional political representative, underscoring how women’s collective agency is routinely overridden despite constitutional commitments to decentralisation in tribal areas.

Decentralisation and tenurial rights under tribal laws emerged as significant electoral planks in the region, culminating in the election of a young Lahauli woman as a Member of the Legislative Assembly in 2023 – only the second woman to represent the constituency in nearly five decades (Manta, Reference Manta2019b). In the aftermath of repeated climate disasters, she has raised in the Assembly questions of rehabilitation and land availability for disaster-displaced families. As she stated: ‘Jangal hamara, zameen hamari, par kanoon humara nahi’ – our forests are ours, our land is ours, but the law is not ours – highlighting delays in compensation and rehabilitation but also deeper contradictions within environmental governance structures that systematically marginalise mountain communities. Read together, these claims articulate a grounded climate politics linking environmental protection with tenure, rehabilitation, decentralised authority, recognition, and dignity.

6. The trans-Himalaya as contested site of climate politics and gendered agency: a discussion

This paper sets out to examine how forest governance, women’s collective action, and climate politics intersect in the trans-Himalayan region of Lahaul (Table 1). Bringing together environmental history, feminist political ecology, and climate justice allows us to situate contemporary forest governance within longer histories of enclosure, differentiated labour relations, and ongoing struggles over authority, rights, and ecological futures. Rather than yielding a celebratory narrative of participatory restoration, our findings reveal a complex and uneven socio-ecological terrain shaped by the interaction of physiography, historical enclosures, market transitions, and differentiated social relations. Forest governance in Lahaul today is produced through the coexistence of multiple, sometimes contradictory processes: non-elite environmentalism alongside environmentality; care-based ecological practices within cash-based livelihood dependencies; and claims of Indigeneity that are entangled with class-caste hierarchies, labour relations, and capitalist transformations rather than existing outside them.

Table 1.

A tabular representation of forest governance regimes discussed in the paper

Table 1 Long description

The table traces the major overlapping forest governance regimes in Lahaul from the 1920s to the present, spanning centralised state regulation, household agroforestry, land reforms, community-led forest protection, JFM, FRA, and externally aided projects. It shows how these regimes operate across different scales and institutions, with women superscript subscript’s roles ranging from absence in formal state regimes to central authority in Mahila Mandals and formal rights under FRA. Their interactions produce enclosure and restricted access, hybrid local systems, bureaucratic participation, legal pluralism, and fragmented project-based governance, reshaping commons access and human superscript subscript –nature relations over time.

THED = Theory of Himalayan Degradation; VFDS = Village Forest Development Societies.

We argue that, amidst these contradictions, contemporary state-led and donor-driven forest governance in the trans-Himalaya operates through selective recognition: afforestation is valorised as restoration, material substitution as sustainability, and enclosure as conservation. This same unevenness registers affectively as well as materially, even as territorial access, tenurial claims, and women’s labour and knowledge remain marginalised. Analytically, this requires moving beyond official narratives centred on forest cover, participation rates, and saplings planted to examine the governance relationships, gendered labour relations, and landscape epistemologies that these metrics render invisible. The interrelated findings discussed below therefore reframe forest governance in the trans-Himalaya as a terrain of contested climate politics.

Colonial forest classification, followed by postcolonial conservation and development regimes, sought to territorialise landscapes historically governed through mobility, reciprocity, and customary norms, producing what Peluso and Vandergeest (Reference Peluso and Vandergeest2020) describe as ‘political forests’: landscapes continually reorganised through shifting state and market imperatives. Central to this process has been the all-encompassing ‘forest’ category itself – from UPF classifications that bundled glaciers, alpine pastures, and sparsely treed landscapes under forest administration, to contemporary carbon-centred restoration narratives that reinscribe the same jurisdictional logic under climate finance. In the trans-Himalaya – historically shaped by mobility and threshold geographies (Singh, Reference Singh2018) – such processes transformed agro-pastoral landscapes into bounded and governable territories.

Contemporary restoration efforts therefore cannot be disentangled from longer histories of enclosure and control. These histories continue to be reworked through environmental governmentality, which regulates access, redefines dependence, and disciplines forest use in the name of conservation and restoration (Agrawal, Reference Agrawal2005). Yet FPE has long complicated this account from within: environmentality operates unevenly, is refracted through gender, and is continually reworked in its everyday, gendered enactment, rather than producing uniformly compliant subjects (Asiyanbi & Massarella, Reference Asiyanbi and Massarella2020; Mikulewicz, Reference Mikulewicz2020; Nightingale et al., Reference Nightingale, Eriksen, Taylor, Forsyth, Pelling, Newsham, Boyd, Brown, Harvey, Jones, Bezner Kerr, Mehta, Naess, Ockwell, Scoones, Tanner and Whitfield2020; Sultana, Reference Sultana2022).

As mahila mandals assumed responsibility for forest protection, the state simultaneously withdrew from everyday enforcement, relying on women’s labour while retaining institutional authority. The shift from the sickle of agro-pastoral labour to the scissors of forest protection captures the transition from landscapes worked and used to landscapes monitored and regulated, in which women’s labour persists even as its character and recognition change. Building on feminist political ecology, such forms of participation must be situated within institutional arrangements, property relations, and the distribution of labour and authority, rather than read as expressions of inherent environmentalism (Agarwal, Reference Agarwal2010). Women’s agency here emerges through negotiation, obligation, and everyday practices of care, and is marked by unequal burdens, conflict, and differentiated responsibilities. At the same time, women’s account of imposing ‘our own restrictions on other uses too’ suggests that this agency is not solely reactive to state withdrawal. Women’s collectives have also shaped regulatory practices in ways that exceed departmental mandates, complicating a purely top-down reading of environmentality, where discipline and agency are not sequential but produced together in the same everyday practice.

Women’s resistance to hydropower and tourism-related interventions is another instance in which women’s practice co-produces the terms on which environmental authority operates. These contestations show women acting not only within forest governance regimes but also challenging the developmental and institutional arrangements through which landscapes are governed. This same unevenness registers affectively as well as materially. As Himika Bhattacharya’s Narrating Violence and Love (2017) demonstrates, Lahauli women’s agency often emerges through everyday negotiations with structural violence. In this context, rage, frustration, humour, and exhaustion are not incidental emotions but expressions of care, labour, and belonging that remain invisible within patriarchal and technocratic discourses of conservation and climate action.

When forest governance is formalised through project frameworks, VFDSs, and expert-led conservation plans, women’s experiential knowledge is displaced by technocratic, masculinised expertise. Women’s participation becomes both labour and a legitimising symbol for donor-driven interventions, particularly under climate-finance frameworks that require gender inclusion. This pattern reveals how patriarchy operates across scales: unpaid, care-intensive forest labour is normalised at the community level, while authority, finance, and legitimacy flow upward through state–donor bureaucracies. FPE makes visible that this is not a failure of implementation but a structural feature of the contemporary green economy (Wichterich, Reference Wichterich, Harcourt and Nelson2015) – one that values measurable outputs (trees planted, hectares restored, carbon sequestered) over democratic decision-making, justice, and accountability.

This disjuncture between participation and meaningful recognition also becomes visible in the continued sidelining of legal and constitutional frameworks that recognise local authority. Laws like FRA that foreground gram sabha authority, women’s representation, and joint land titles remain resisted because they threaten the political economy of green growth. Material substitution – through LPG, subsidised timber, and market-based livelihoods – is promoted as an alternative to rights-based governance, offering access to resources and welfare while rendering the conferral of tenure and authority seemingly redundant. From a climate justice perspective, these exclusions are deeply consequential (Johnson et al., Reference Johnson, Mikulewicz, Bigger, Chakraborty, Cunniff, Griffin, Guermond, Lambrou, Mills-Novoa, Neimark, Nelson, Rampini, Sherpa and Simon2023). Lahaul’s exposure to floods, avalanches, and land subsidence cannot be addressed through plantations or livelihood diversification alone. Rather, they demand attention to both distributional and procedural justice: who bears risk and labour, and who holds decision-making power. Positioned simultaneously as a strategic zone, a climate frontier, and a site of ecological fragility, the trans-Himalaya are increasingly governed through urgent, project-based interventions that privilege carbon, biodiversity, and infrastructure over democratic processes (Drew & Gergan, Reference Drew and Gergan2024).

In conclusion, forest governance in Lahaul exposes the limits of technocratic conservation and market-led adaptation in these landscapes. Under the language of restoration, forests are increasingly mobilised as sites of accumulation – of international finance, carbon value, and bureaucratic authority – thereby consolidating the Forest Department’s authority as the principal institutional recipient and manager of donor flows. Women’s collective labour sustains forests and absorbs climate risks, yet remains politically inconvenient within regimes that prioritise control, metrics, and capital flows over rights and justice. Yet the willow-based agroforestry systems, juniper protection regimes, and mutual-accountability norms documented here demonstrate that locally grounded alternatives already exist. Such forms of governance point towards the potential of just FRA implementation, recognition of mahila mandals as decision-making institutions rather than labour pools, and shared custodianship of the commons, with the administration as facilitator rather than gatekeeper exercising proprietorial control through green enclosures.