Compensatory Afforestation in Odisha, India: A Political Ecology of Forest Restoration

To mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity, states across the globe have ambitious plans to restore degraded lands (globally, 350 million hectares by 2030, as per the latest Bonn Challenge commitment). Seeking to understand the potential unintended consequences of these vast state-led restoration efforts, in this thesis I explore India's seven-billion-dollar compensatory afforestation program through a political ecology lens. I find that in practice this policy contradicts India’s broader attempts to democratize forest governance by failing to foreground local communities and institutions, affirm customary rights, and safeguard livelihoods. Instead, compensatory afforestation contributes to dispossession and precarity, while relying heavily on industrial tree plantations. With ground-truthed geospatial data, I explore how this policy impacts Adivasi shifting cultivators on their tenure-insecure territories in Odisha, east India. In so doing, I support calls from the field of Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) to ensure restoration is tenure-sensitive and rights-based.M.A