Book DescriptionIn the northern Indian state of Kumaon, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment Yet by the 1990s they had begun to conserve their forests carefully In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this озошб striking transformation He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combinedin an approach he calls environmentalityto better understand changes in conservation efforts Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon; local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he examined local records, assessed the state of village forests, and interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis Based on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision-makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the connections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.  Кольцо с2005 г 344 стр ISBN 0822334925.