“What do we see at the village level?” asked Jagveer Singh, of GVMNL, an NGO in Rajasthan, in India. “Encroachment is increasing, and regulatory authorities aren’t doing much. People tell us their livelihoods depend on the land. Their elected representatives refuse to act because they feel they will lose votes. Everyone tells us that if there’s a way to establish a united front, in which people are aware of their rights to natural resources, then a path forward is possible.”

But how to find that path forward? Jagveer was relaying his insights to colleagues and members of Collaborating for Resilience (CoRe) and the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) at a virtual workshop in July 2021. The challenge they face is considerable. Around 350 million of India’s rural poor rely on “the Commons” for their livelihoods, the roughly 205 million acres of community forests, pasturelands, and water bodies that provide food, fodder, medicine, firewood, and timber. However, due to encroachment and neglect, India’s rural poor are fast losing control over these common lands, a problem exacerbated by the lack of protection for common pool resources, centralized governance practices, competing interests, and state governments’ tendency to view the Commons as “wastelands” that offer nothing of value to India’s modernizing economy.

Read the full article about communal land by Usmaan Farooqui, Blake Ratner, Jagdeesh Rao, Rahul Chaturvedi, and Pratiti Priyadarshini at Stanford Social Innovation Review.