Assessing the sustainability of bamboo management in central Indian forests

The purpose of this study is to assess the management of bamboo across the gradient of government and community-managed forests in Maharashtra, a leading Central-Indian state in decentralized forest governance. Over the last few decades, new right-based legislations have paved the way for decentralizing forest governance in India. We first pioneered the multi-stakeholder co-production of criteria and indicators to assess the sustainability of bamboo management. Following this, the sustainability assessment was carried out using mixed methods combining vegetation surveys, focus group discussions and secondary records. We could not detect a significant role of governance in determining bamboo health across governance systems. Instead, sites with favourable locality and biotic factors supported a healthy bamboo crop. We found that while government institutions maximized financial efficiency, community institutions performed better on delivering livelihood benefits and participatory decision making. We could not find evidence of large scale over-harvesting in the community-managed forests. On the contrary, less than 5% of the bamboo potential in these villages was harvested. Traditional bamboo management across the governance gradient focused largely on production aspects. Graduating to sustainable bamboo management will require better protection, resource augmentation, sustainable harvest, enhancing livelihood benefits and creating new bulk markets.