Crafting the public sphere in the forests of West Bengal: democracy, development, and political action

Participatory conservation and development initiatives have proliferated al l over the world as the 1990s became the decade for restructuring states an d celebrating civil society. Examining one such major effort, called joint forest management, I propose several new directions for the anthropology of modernity, development, and environment. I scrutinize processes of local s tate-making in the forests of southern West Bengal, India, to reveal key te nsions between development and democratization through an ethnography of po litical action.