Environmental Sociology
Premise
Environmental Sociology at ATREE involves the application of sociological theory and methods
to analyse conflicts that emerge amidst the complex interface between the biophysical and
socio-cultural realms. Focusing on forests, such an effort entails the investigation of attempts
by local communities to secure access to and control over forest resources against the backdrop
of ecological change. Using fieldwork, archival and documentary research, theories that span the
agency-structure debate will be situated spatially and temporally. Thus in analyzing resource
conflicts between local communities, the state, and the market, identities and ideologies are
located in cultural and political milieus. Here agency is configured in cultural contexts
that permeate livelihood exigencies and in structural contexts provided largely by environmental
and economic law and policy. Further, relevant and influential intellectual trends are engaged
with and even linkages sought. For instance theories of 'Agrarian Environments' and
'Statecraft' are linked by juxtaposing the formation of the former as a consequence of failures
in the latter.
Practice
An applied agenda is also evident in addressing conflict resolution, involving the quest for consensus
in the form of equity and sustainability. This is evident in the provision of sociological inputs to
the Conservation and Livelihoods Programme (C&LP). For analytic convenience the social formations across
the five C&LP sites can be politically and economically configured as peasantry. Community characteristics,
subsistence on family farms and labour, the presence of tenurial disparities where land holdings are
generally small or even absent, landless labour, and the presence of non-state groups that mobilize
communities and negotiate with the state over issues such as forest regulations all support
conceptualization as peasantry. This conceptualization potentially complements livelihood initiatives
in manifold ways one among which is the investigation of the very receptivity or resistance of
communities to such initiatives. Further, the dissemination of qualitative methods helps to
understand local customs, resource use and ideology, institutions, moral economy or social
capital, stratification issues etc and in the process impart equity to the enterprise and ensure sustainability.
In addressing conservation, the imparting of sustainability to production pursuits in and around forests
depends, as mentioned, on community receptivity. Here there is the need to assess local capabilities
to practice resource prudence. This necessitates the appraisal of recent livelihood literature, which
would point to the 'Entitlement and Capabilities' genre. This effort is representative of environmental
sociology's theoretical engagements and also its contribution to applied research and practice.
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