The Journal of Peasant Studies

ISSN: 0306-6150 (Print) 1743-9361 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20

Re-inventing the commons: community forestry as

accumulation without dispossession in Nepal

Dinesh Paudel

To cite this article: Dinesh Paudel (2016): Re-inventing the commons: community forestry
as accumulation without dispossession in Nepal, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2015.1130700

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2015.1130700

Published online: 15 Feb 2016.

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The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2015.1130700

Re-inventing the commons: community forestry as accumulation

without dispossession in Nepal
Dinesh Paudel

The commercial appropriation of the commons by displacing communities has been a

historical feature of development. In recent years, however, this paradigm has shifted
toward re-inventing the commons by creating new relations of production for both
the market and subsistence. Such shifts in managing the commons are producing new
forms of commoning instead of enclosure and dispossession. Through the analysis of
community forestry programs in Nepal, this paper demonstrates that community-
based development has been effective in mobilizing the collective potential of local
communities and dynamics of commonly held forest ecosystems for the expansion of
highly protable commercial endeavors. Community forestry can be understood
neither as an enclosure exclusively for commodity production nor as the extension of
entirely subsistence economic activities. In Nepal, community forestry has become a
form of accumulation without dispossession where communities ownership over the
common forestlands is ensured but market apparatuses for commercialization are also
institutionalized simultaneously. This paper argues that while transforming the
commons and communities as part and parcel of capital accumulation, community
forestry generates possibilities for both commercial and subsistence modes of
production, reproducing the conditions for accumulation without dispossession.
Keywords: community; subsistence; accumulation without dispossession; the
commons; Nepal

Introduction
In a lowland village of western Nepal, a little after midnight, house owner Gopal came to my
room and said, Sir, its time to go. He knew that I wanted to see his extra night job that starts
after midnight and ends at dawn. He works with a group of men who go into the forest, cut trees
and load them into a truck. I joined the crew; two trees were felled and logs were loaded. I
asked, Why are you giving these logs to the contractor? This is your community forest. He
replied, We get wage for our work and some income for community funds. But all are
involved in this business; rangers, our leaders, contractors divide the prot and eat! We also
get some income and also tree branches, so it is better than nothing. Late the next morning,
I saw a big pile of branches and tree leaves in front of the house. I asked Gopals wife
where she got them. She replied, They are the leftovers after the contractor took away his
part. I jokingly told her, So he took the gold, and you are enjoying the remaining ashes,
right? She replied, These branches and leaves are the gold for us; we cannot survive
without them.1

1
Observation of commercial harvesting in Dang district, Nepal.

2016 Taylor & Francis

2 Dinesh Paudel

Gopals timber saga and his wifes desperation for the leftover tree branches bear
witness to how the common forestlands are being commercialized and market systems
are being grafted onto the everyday lives of Nepals peasant communities. Instead of
creating private enclosures by dispossessing traditional commoners and grabbing land
and resources using foreign capital, the recurrent story of accumulation by disposses-
sion in other parts of the world, the Nepali stories comes with a twist: accumulation
without dispossession. New schemes of commercialization in community forestry
strive to mobilize members of village communities as entrepreneurial subjects and pro-
ducers of forest-based commodities such as timber, medicinal plants, bers and varieties
of natural products. Using a participatory development approach, community forestry
reorganizes peasants into collective groups to perform a dual function: on the one
hand, to produce high-value goods targeting niche markets frequented by urban upper
classes and, on the other, to rejuvenate forest stocks implementing scientic management
techniques. Informed by the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation (THED)
that emerged in the 1970s (Eckholm 1976; Guthman 1997) and the perceived urgency of
rescuing Himalayan peasants and the environment they inhabit from lack of develop-
ment and ecological degradation (Blaikie, Cameron, and Seddon 1980; Hamilton
1987), international development agencies intensied community forestry programs in
Nepal from the 1990s. By involving peasant communities in managing forest resources
to increase both economic and environmental benets, community forestry has resur-
rected some aspects of the historical relationship of co-existence between rural commu-
nities and their common forests. However, this revival has been accompanied by the
increasing presence of market interests in the name of economic growth (aarthik
kranti). In short, common forests have been re-invented as catchments for peoples
basic subsistence needs but also as reservoirs for commercial products. As I will demon-
strate, the commercialization of community forests has not been a dramatic event;
instead and this makes it all the more disquieting it has gradually insinuated
itself into the lives of peasants, creating a new terrain of accumulation without dispos-
session. The commons remain, but as sites of contradictory logics: a commercial
commons.
As a large scholarship demonstrates (Thirsk 1985; Ostrom 1990; Neeson 1993;
Agrawal 1996), various forms of the commons have long been central in reproducing the
natural and socio-economic conditions of existence in peasant society. In Nepal, where
peasant communities are also indigenous populations, common forests and pasturelands
have been a centripetal force, cementing group solidarity, underwriting subsistence liveli-
hoods and, at key historical moments, operating as catalysts for political mobilization. It is
now commonplace to contrast commons to commodities as embodiments of different
economic and social logics. The commons refers to commonly appropriated resources,
indigenous collective practices and non-alienating relations of production not traditionally
under the realm of commodity production (see e.g. Thompson 1991; Neeson 1993; Line-
baugh 2009). Within the paradigms of the market and international development,
however, the commons were long viewed through the lter of the tragedy of the
commons: stocks of natural resources that were neither privately owned nor under the
full command of state authority, and as such at risk of depletion. This prompted large-
scale interventions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to introduce property regimes, both
state-centered and private.
In Nepal, a process of forest nationalization was initiated, aimed at introducing indus-
trial forestry with aid from the World Bank. By the late 1970s, it was apparent in Nepal and
elsewhere that such programs had been disastrous. Ostrom and others (Ostrom 1990;
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 3

Banand and Platteau 1996) recognized that the prevalence of the tragedy of the commons
narrative had distorted facts on the ground, masking how communities were often keen
managers of their common resources. This led to the rise of common property resource
theory, sparking a shift in international development toward the idea of community-
based management that targeted commonly held resources (forests, water, sheries) and
community groups (peasants, women, villagers, indigenous nationalities). In Nepal, com-
munity forestry indicates an extension of community ownership over the forestlands in
which the state and the market collaborate with the local people for the management and
production of forest products. In its 40-year journey since the 1970s, community forestry
has become one of the biggest development interventions in Nepal, with more than
18,000 registered forest user groups, covering above half of the countrys forestlands
(Paudel 2012).
Ironically, while no longer understood as a tragedy, the commons has become the
mainstay of a successful accumulation regime. In this paper, I argue that community for-
estry is successful in mobilizing the commons in an instance of accumulation without
dispossession, transforming community resource-management collectives into the
kernel of highly protable commercial production. My study was conducted in Dang
and Rolpa districts in western Nepal, covering community forestry programs in both
hilly areas and the plains in the south. Hill communities are involved in producing med-
icinal plants, whereas timber is the priority for the communities in the plains. However,
the commercial processes and actors involved are very similar in both geographies.
Through ethnographic case studies of community forestry in these areas, I demonstrate
that both the moral economic structures of peasant communities and the commons they
sustain can become part and parcel of circuits of capital accumulation without fully alie-
nating from community ownership structures and subsistence means of production.
Community forestry organizes production of commercial goods (timber, medicinal
herbs) and subsistence means of livelihood (fodder, rewood) simultaneously to regen-
erate the conditions of possibility for accumulation. This form of accumulation allows
commercial and subsistence modes of production to co-exist, and reproduces itself as
a strategy of capitalist development in peasant societies without completely degenerating
community structures.

Accumulation and the commons

Scholars of agrarian political economy have repeatedly demonstrated that explaining the
processes of capitalist accumulation in peasant societies requires a comprehensive analysis
of the historically and geographically contingent transition from pre-/non-capitalist to capi-
talist social relations in a given agrarian context (Marx 1967; Kautsky 1988; De Janvry
1975; de Angelis 2001). For Marx (1967), the transition to capitalism required primitive
accumulation that is, the separation of producers from their means of production. This
event transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production
into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-laborers (Marx 1967,
668). Primitive accumulation thus leads to the creation of a free proletariat, separated
from the means of subsistence except its labor-power, the subsumption of non-capitalist
forms of production, the emergence of capitalist class, and the development of social
relations of production where labor-power is exchanged for wages (Marx 1967; Perelman
2000).
Marx framed his project in Capital in such a way that primitive accumulation would
cease once the division between wage-laborers and capitalists was consolidated, and a
4 Dinesh Paudel

society embarked on the trajectory from formal subsumption of labor to capital to real sub-
sumption (Marx 1967).2 However, drawing on experiences particularly from the global
South and Rosa Luxemburgs analysis of uneven capitalist development in her pivotal
book, The accumulation of capital (2003 [1913]) Marxist development scholars have
increasingly come to view primitive accumulation as an ongoing process within capitalist
social formations (Perelman 2000; de Angelis 2004; Moore 2004). Recognizing the co-
existence of capitalist and non-capitalist economies and ongoing processes of primitive
accumulation sharpens our analysis of agrarian political economy, but these scholars
remain silent on the extent to which separation of producers from their means of production
is necessary to establish and deepen capitalist modes of production in peasant society. This
question has important political implications. For example, community-based development
in Nepal (and other agrarian contexts) has aspired to reproduce both the commons and com-
mercial commodity production, without dispossessing peasants from their means of liveli-
hood. A series of questions follow: when does the expanded reproduction of capital require
the simultaneous reproduction of non-capitalist commons, how is this co-existence repro-
duced, and in what ways does it shape peasants perceptions of exploitation and sense of
wellbeing?
The articulation of modes of production (MoP) framework provides leverage on these
questions, by viewing postcolonial capitalist social formations, particularly in peripheral
regions, as an articulated unity of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production (Althus-
ser and Balibar 1997 [1968]; De Janvry 1975; Hindess and Hirst 1975; Amin 1976; Wolpe
1980). Extending Kautskys (1988 [1899]) arguments in The agrarian question, the articu-
lation of modes of production theory contends that a capitalist social formation is a
complex whole (in the Althusserian sense) where capitalist and non-capitalist forms of
production and, hence, social relations co-exist in a complex structural unity (Althusser
and Balibar 1997 [1968]; see also Banaji 1976). As Wolpe (1980, 39) summarizes,

Thus, it is possible, on the one hand, that capitalist enterprises might arise within a social for-
mation in which feudal laws of motion are operative and, on the other hand, it is equally poss-
ible, for example, that the effect of capitalist laws of motion might be to displace those of the
feudal economy without destroying feudal relations and forces of production under which
enterprises are organized.

Analyses that draw inspiration from the MoP framework argue that a structured unity serves
capitals need for cheap labor power and raw materials in short, because pre-capitalist
modes of production subsidize capital, it is benecial for capital to preserve non-capitalist
sectors. De Janvry (1975) refers to this as a functional dualism (for a non-functionalist
contemporary account, see Sanyal 2007). In functional dualism, capitalists allow pre-capi-
talist forms of production to survive in order to push down the cost of wage goods, thereby
obtaining a wage subsidy for industrial production that is, allowing capitalist employers to

2
Some argue that Marx knew well from his studies of societies where capitalism was rending pre-capi-
talist social relations especially Ireland, India, Poland and Russia that primitive accumulation was
an uneven historical process and that the British experience was unusual in many respects (see e.g.
Anderson 2010). However, in order to explain capitals internal contradictions in Capital Vol. I, he
did not elaborate on these complexities, but instead posited a theoretically simplied capitalist
society. In this imagined social space there were only two classes: capital and labor. Based on his
later writings (i.e. after 18571858), Marx never expected such an ideal capitalist society to come
into existence. As Luxemburg 2003 [1913] points out, Marxs theoretical formulation was an
effect of the stringent assumptions with which he organized his project in Capital Vol. I.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 5

push wages below socially necessary labor time necessary for the reproduction of labor-
power (De Janvry 1981; Bebbington 1999). Such an arrangement increases the rate of
surplus accumulation while preserving pre-capitalist forms of production in a relation of
subordination to capital.
Forms of commercial production in the commons that we witness in Nepal resemble but
are not, strictly speaking, an instance of functional dualism because community institutions
rather than capitalist rms are the basis for extracting community labor for the production of
commodities, and there is no wage subsidy to external capitalist enterprise. The prots from
commodities go to private individuals (including powerful members of the village), while
the less powerful residents receive wages as well as access to minor forest produce. Legal
ownership of the means of production in this instance, community forests remains with
the community, but the surplus value produced by application of labor is privately appro-
priated in the form of forest-based market commodities. Advocates of this hybrid system
view it as a winwin for subsistence livelihoods, economic growth and ecological integ-
rity (Scherr, White, and Kaimowitz 2004). Pre-capitalist relations of production are neither
functionally retained nor subsumed to capital in the Nepalese case; indeed, village commu-
nities gain increased power to exercise their entitlement over common resources, even as
they become integrated into circuits of accumulation through the introduction of a commer-
cial apparatus that mobilizes community practices for in situ production rather than expro-
priating common resources via processes of dispossession.
Over the last decade, Harveys (2003) thesis of accumulation by dispossession (ABD)
has been widely used to explain how neoliberal pathways of capital accumulation actively
dispossess people of access to and control over a gamut of public resources, including tra-
ditional and non-traditional commons, through corporate mechanisms, state-led interven-
tions and development initiatives (de Angelis 2003; Harvey 2003; Hart 2006; Perreault
2014). ABD is often treated as an event in which a new site of accumulation in the
form of an enclosure is established through the top-down coercive forces of the market
and the state (Blomley 2008; Levien 2012; Jeffrey, McFarlane, and Vasudevan 2012).
The ABD analytic has been applied with special vigor to explain the growing phenomenon
of land grabbing by foreign and domestic capital in urban and rural areas of the global south
(Borras et al. 2011; De Schutter 2011; Scoones et al. 2013; Wolford et al. 2013).
However, Foster (2015, 6) has pointed out that as a concept ABD is so capacious that it
divorces from concrete and historical concerns and risks losing the analytical sharpness of
its predecessor, the notion of primitive accumulation. There are emerging forms of accumu-
lation that might create the conditions for communities to become producers and stake-
holders in the process of accumulation (see Li 2014), which t uneasily under the ABD
mantle. ABD is insufciently attentive to how community differences create conditions
for accumulation. For example, as feminist political economists have demonstrated, com-
munity heterogeneity in terms of gender, caste, race and other subject positions can be
mobilized to facilitate processes of accumulation (Wright 2014; Mollett 2014). In commu-
nity-based development, commercialization is promoted as desirable and protable to
every member of the community by generating collective commercial aspirations in estab-
lishing both systems of accumulation and subsistence. It involves a process of subject inter-
pellation, where members of peasant communities are summoned as new entrepreneurial
subjects by promoting them as owners and stakeholders in forest management and pro-
duction; this then becomes the basis for relations of production that can be aptly character-
ized as accumulation without dispossession.
It is clear that capitalist accumulation premised on any theory of original accumulation
entails severing direct producers from their means of production, especially land. But in the
6 Dinesh Paudel

case of commercialization in community forestry an instance of accumulation without dis-

possession the means of production, land, remains community-owned and producers are
not severed from it. Nevertheless, a process of capital accumulation is set in motion.
The idea of commoning might allow us to understand how a situation of accumulation
without dispossession is reproduced in Nepals forest commons. Linebaugh (2009) uses the
term commoning to refer to systems of production and sharing of resources that follow
equalitarian principles and non-hierarchical relations within communities with respect to
commons (also see, de Angelis 2003; Hardt and Negri 2009; Gidwani 2013). Some scholars
have proposed commoning as an alternative to enclosure and commodication (Hardt and
Negri 2009; Casarino and Negri 2009; Jeffrey, McFarlane, and Vasudevan 2012).
However, in Nepals community forestry programs, commoning is promoted both in
non-commercial sectors, especially the collection of non-timber forest products, and for
commercial timber production. The result is a social formation that continues to lubricate
community interactions, solidarity and collective forms of subjectivity, even as it abets cir-
cuits of capital accumulation.

Capital and commoning in Nepals community forestry

The basic idea of Nepals community forestry was to replace the states control of forest-
resource extraction, typical in the 1950s and 1960s, with that of community control
(Gilmour and Fisher 1991). Community forestry was implemented to secure subsistence
livelihoods for rural communities and to reinvent property rights of common forestlands,
which could then be mobilized for rural economic growth and the market (Agrawal and
Larson 2006). Reworking indigenous systems of production as subservient to capital
accumulation came to typify community forestry in Nepal in the 1970s.3
The nationalization of the forests in 1957 proved a policy catastrophe as it increased
deforestation, encroachment and bureaucratic corruption. At the same time, communities
who were using the forests collectively prior to nationalization, though they were governed
under local feudal hierarchies, were denied access to the forests, leading to further antag-
onism and resistance (Gilmour and Fisher 1991). International development agencies pro-
moted community forestry as an answer to these perceived problems of deforestation and
corruption so that peasant communities would take part in forestry activities and increase
the productive potential of the forests. Over the last decade, community forestry has devel-
oped commercially compatible relationships between communities and common forests,
leading to a new mode of production.
The dynamics of a community group in Dang district, western Nepal, illustrate how these
relationships between capital and commoning emerged in community forestry. The group
includes 200 households and owns about 300 hectares of forests. By measuring the yearly
harvestable quantity for each tree species, what goes to market and what is consumed
locally are clearly dened. Use of non-commercial species is encouraged, but harvesting
practices must improve the productivity of commercial species. These community practices
are institutionalized via formal structures of the forest committee, secretariat and operational
plans, and the committee punishes rule-breakers. One landless peasant member noted:

3
Several conditions generated this possibility: (1) donors ideas of market-led development; (2) the
emergence of concepts of participation; (3) growing concerns over environmental conservation in
light of the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation; and (4) indigenous systems of resource
allocation (Eckholm 1976; Gilmour and Fisher 1991; Metz 1991; Malla 2001).
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 7

We cut the trees, but the committee sells the timber to contractors. But we get rewood, leaves,
thatch grasses and also timber if we build a new house. I feel OK because we never used those
big trees in the past, anyways.

In reproducing these conditions for both commercial and subsistence production, commu-
nity forestry programs have had to respond to national and local policy changes, which have
themselves been shaped by the changing strategies and methodologies of the dominant
development discourses, especially ideas of participation, efciency and growth. Multi-
layered alliances exist between development projects, businesses, non-governmental organ-
izations (NGOs), national bureaucracy and community leaders, all of whom implicitly and
explicitly produce, strategize, contextualize and implement changes in priorities and pol-
icies. These alliances have complex operations, with participants maintaining separate iden-
tities while collectively creating discursive spaces for implementing ideas, guaranteeing
accumulation at multiple levels. One NGO activist in Rolpa district shares his experience:

The communities here believe that they are the owners of the forests, but in reality what they
can do and how they generate benets are designed by people in Kathmandu. Very powerful
are the contractors; their money brings everyone in agreement, even poor farmers. But nothing
goes smoothly all the time; community members sometimes rise up.

The everyday involvement of communities in community forestry helped to gradually

change peoples behaviors and forest dynamics from subsistence use of resources toward
commercial production. For example, in the 1970s and early 1980s, community forestry
focused on generating forest products by implementing a massive planting drive to
create a resource base, especially of exotic and fast-growing species (Gilmour and Fisher
1991). Community forest user groups (CFUGs) were created to govern the forests as
rational appropriators by carrying out tree plantings and to manage the allotted forest
plots.4 Though these initiatives, communities practices were heterogeneous; therefore,
community forestry created a set of common institutional mechanisms to systematically
consolidate and transform local practices (Hobley 1996). Training providers and facilitators
were sent to each community to help them follow the exact procedures in developing forest
management plans. According to one retired ofcial, It was like a campaign, moving from
one village to the next to teach them how to formulate committees, record meeting minutes
and implement decisions. Nevertheless, these campaigns of building local institutions both
connected multiple communities and helped re-invent the practices of commoning such as
collective grazing, rewood collection, monthly forest visits, collective enumeration and
distribution of goods according to family needs.
Collective laboring was also introduced in commercial production such as planting
seedlings, weeding, cleaning, silvicultural operations, fencing, patrolling and recording
the stock in the forests. Such practices were promoted as the social and environmental
responsibility of the community for the good of the society and the planet. Ruj Bahadur
Roka, a peasant from the Rolpa district, recalls his experience of working in the village
nursery and plantation during the 1980s as one of the remarkable events in terms of devel-
oping unity among community members and implementing forestry programs. He said:

4
According to this idea, the lack of available forest products was the explanation for poverty, so sub-
sistence farmers were asked to plant trees on their private land, as well as in common forests (Metz
1991).
8 Dinesh Paudel

In every spring, communities used to gather together to prepare the nursery. The forest ofce
provided the polythene bags and seeds, and we did the nursery work turn by turn. Summers
were like festivals because everyone participated in planting seedlings. It was like a reunion
for us.

These community practices that were based on non-commodity relations of rejuvenating the
forests as a community ritual continued to exist even after the trees were ready for commer-
cialization. These trees and many other non-timber products provided a new foundation for
transforming communities toward commercial production and marketing.
By the early 1990s, the focus turned to promoting entrepreneurial management by
developing partnerships with private investors and the market. Development programs
identied community activities as being inefcient, irrational and dominated by informal
local practices that is, a lack of expertise (Nightingale 2005). The focus thus changed
to using community forestry to align attitudes and behaviors with entrepreneurial norms
and values. New guidelines were developed with an emphasis on transferring entrepreneur-
ship and scientic forest management skills to community groups. Community meeting
minutes from the 1990s reveal that forestry programs selected certain communities to
develop them as a model of commercial production. NGOs worked with these selected
communities to identify production managers and raw material collectors who were then
put in contact with urban contractors. These interventions were based on the then-emerging
development concepts of social capital and multi-stakeholder ownership. Communities
supplied forest products to commercial rms for further processing, legal clearance, trans-
portation and marketing.
Utilizing this discourse of social capital, forest user groups formed a federation at the
national level to protect their rights from the state.5 This network was facilitated by devel-
opment projects to enhance collaboration and collective empowerment, and many network
members joined the alliances of forest ofcials and contractors for commercial benets (as
elaborated below). However, the network also emerged as a pressure group against the state
and commercial interests, especially at the district level, and it played a signicant role in
politicizing access to land, resources and power. Despite this emerging resistance, develop-
ment facilitators actively engaged in devising localized systems to help communities estab-
lish production and marketing mechanisms that could integrate other forms of common life,
such as subsistence farming, animal herding and various forms of moral economic pro-
duction practices, into a commercial system of appropriation.
The sequential shifts in community forestry ideas and strategies have sought to change
the structure of the commons (forest ecosystem) and practices of communities into a state of
capitalist accumulation. These changes systematically built commercially compatible com-
munity institutions and practices by introducing new policies and methods, each building
on the previous one, and by implementing more rational group activities. As a result,
this process has changed community groups into quasi-production units for corporations
by systematically building conditions that facilitated the co-existence of both commercial
and subsistence productions.

5
Federation of Community Forestry User Groups was established in the early 1990s for coordinated
implementation of community forestry. Development projects also involve them in advancing market
reach in rural areas.
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 9

Accumulation in community forestry

The commercialization of community forests in Nepal has been induced and sustained
through a combination of multiple mechanisms, forces and everyday practices initiated
by community forestry projects. Such a conjuncture of forces operated in the past in appro-
priating the commons (primarily feudal order and subsistence uses), but these commercial
arrangements invented social elements (such as entrepreneurs, market agents, trainers, skills
and group leaders) and also rearranged existing forces (such as caste, patriarchy, loan pro-
visions and informal rules). Community forestry promoted commercialization via prioritiz-
ing income-generating activities and developing skilled entrepreneurs, scientic techniques
and market alliances.
The non-timber forest products (NTFPs) from the upper altitudes have entered into
commercial circuits by re-mobilizing middlemen and contractors who traditionally supplied
these products through conventional market channels as barter exchange, whereas new
supply chains emerged in the southern plains to commercialize high value Sal timber
(Shorea robusta), led by urban traders and companies in Kathmandu. In both cases,
efforts by community forestry projects to generate higher stocks of forest resources,
expose communities to the market, and develop local control of traders and entrepreneurs
collectively pushed community groups to adopt commercialization. Factors repeatedly used
to justify urgent commercialization include the total stock of the forests, which increased
substantially because of intensive community protection for decades. The argument has
been that the harvestable portion of the forests exceeds local demands. This section analyses
how these ideas are translated into everyday practices of communities, and in what ways
these emerging new practices create the conditions of possibility for accumulation
without dispossession in Nepals community forestry.

Commercialization for livelihoods

As an initial strategy of promoting commercialization, community forestry disseminated
the idea of commercial production as a natural step toward better living conditions. The
community forestry projects and associated NGOs convincingly presented the prospect
of additional income in group meetings, community plans and daily harvesting operations.
They were involved in mapping out a positive relationship between income generation and
improvement in desperate peasant livelihoods. The government and other rural develop-
ment programs promoted commercialization simultaneously as a solution to unemploy-
ment, lack of infrastructure and poverty. The special nature of commercial production of
forest products, which requires only partial involvement as wage-labor, was particularly
attractive, especially to women. Women collect medicinal plants to sell to contractors
while collecting dead branches for rewood or taking cattle for grazing. Hiring full-time
wage-labor was neither required nor benecial. Peasants could work as partial wage-
laborers while also generating their own means of living. As a result, commercialization
has remained increasingly protable, and community members have become more disci-
plined through their changed behavior to work for both commercial and subsistence
purposes.
Take, for example, the experiences of a group of women in Rolpa district who have
been collecting non-timber forest products for contractors for more than 15 years:

On a sunny day in early spring, some women were taking a rest in a Chautari (a resting place at
the edge of walking trail), each with a heavy bundle of rewood. On top of each bundle hung a
tightly tied, large plastic sack. These sacks contained Guchhi Chyau (Morchella mushroom),
10 Dinesh Paudel

two types of fern, and herbal roots. The rewood and the ferns were collected for household
consumption, whereas the mushrooms and roots were gathered to sell to middlemen. All pro-
ducts were collected in one trip. When we reach home, rst we eat lunch and then take our
cattle for grazing, but our Sasu (mother in-law) cleans and dries the mushrooms. We pack
them before we go to bed at night. Naike (middleman) comes once in a while and takes
them away, they explained. They identied names and quantities of more than seventeen
species they have been trading, including mushrooms, ferns, mosses, bers, barks, leaves,
fruits, herbal plants, roots, stems, and stone minerals. They listed more than eleven subsistence
species. One was trained in cash crop production and others were active in savings and credit
groups.
I asked: Why do you sell them instead of consuming by yourself?
They replied: We used to consume them as our Khanki [everyday diet], but we started selling
them to buy other things that we need. We collect these products while we do other things. We
came to collect rewood this morning but also collected mushroom.
I asked: Does the extra income you receive compensate enough for your time?
They replied: There is no exact allocation of time only for mushrooms. With this income, we
buy rice, kerosene oil, clothes and utensils. But they are expensive. We end up with more debt
every year.

Even though the women were paid less and pushed into a continuous cycle of debt, they
were willing to produce and sell more products. Their dietary system changed and the com-
moning practices have been restricted to certain products. It is, in fact, the strong association
between the bundles of rewood for cooking, provided free to the commoners, and the
sacks of mushrooms produced as a commodity, generating accumulation without disposses-
sing, that has continuously reproduced commercialization. In this process, the commodity
production is maintained through partial labor arrangements. For example, the mushrooms
these women collect from the forest grow on rock cliffs and slopes with abundant moisture.
The collection season lasts only for two months, just before the start of the monsoon. The
mushrooms are visible in the morning before they wilt from the sunlight. With the moisture
they get at night, mushrooms regain strength and are available for collection next morning.
This cycle continues just for a few weeks before the mushrooms die off. The middlemen do
not need full-time workers to pick mushrooms, and these women workers do not have to
spend the entire day and season collecting mushrooms. They collect mushrooms while
they go to the forest to gather rewood and ferns for household consumption. They
spend about two hours collecting mushrooms before they gather rewood. They also
collect the kathe mushroom that grows on deadwood for consumption. This mushroom
does not have any buyers yet. In about four hours, each woman gathers a bundle of re-
wood, a sack of mushrooms for the middleman, and ferns and kathe mushrooms for the
family. After this morning trip, women are involved in cattle rearing, farming and other sub-
sistence activities. In this way, these female laborers earn their subsistence not only from the
commercial harvesting of the mushrooms but also from the direct use of non-commercial
products, including rewood, leaf litter, and wild fruits and vegetables. This dynamic
frees the community and contractors from paying the full cost of living to the direct
producers.
The continuation of a subsistence mode of production in non-commodied sectors has
allowed accumulation without dispossession to become an always-ongoing process in com-
munity forestry. On one hand, the middlemen or trading companies do not invest in protect-
ing the forest or growing these mushrooms. On the other hand, communities have been
managing the forests not only to grow mushrooms and other commercial products, but
also to care for the forest. Caring for forests is part of their culture and identity, and it is
a source of livelihoods in an ecosystem of coexistence. Time invested for years or
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 11

generations in protecting and rejuvenating the forests is not factored in when selling mush-
rooms or other perennial timber species. If masses of wage-laborers separated from every
means of production except their labor-power are produced in every community, there
will be no incentive for wage-laborers to protect and manage forests. As a consequence,
resource depletion would escalate and commercialization would fall apart, undermining
the conditions of its own existence. For the traders, the capital investment required for
the protection and management of trees and other biological resources, which requires hun-
dreds of years, is not protable. Wage-laborers would not look after forests if their wages
werent paid, as they would not rely on subsistence utilization of forest products under a
fully wage-labor based capitalist mode of production.
The value chain of mushroom production and marketing is also combined with other
commercial and non-commercial activities. Depending on the weather and time availability,
each collector gathers from a few grams to a maximum of a half-kilogram of mushrooms in
one trip. The middlemen pay about USD6 per kilogram (in 2013) to the collectors. The
actual payment happens once a month or at the end of the season only. The middlemen
are responsible for drying the mushrooms properly, packaging them according to standards
and transporting them to the exporters or trading companies. Some middlemen buy from the
collectors rst and sell to the urban-based contractors for about USD15 to USD20 per kilo-
gram depending on the quantity and quality supplied, but many operate as local agents of
the exporting company. Usually middlemen take the responsibility of obtaining govern-
ment permission, offering bribes and networking with NGOs and community leaders.
The urban contractors supply the mushrooms to Chinese or Indian companies at the
border, whereas export companies are involved in supplying the mushrooms to Europe
or the Middle East. I traveled with a contractor to the Chinese border in 2013. He was sup-
plying the mushrooms and other medicinal plants to a Chinese company. While settling
bribes with the police and working through the paperwork at a tea shop, he pointed
towards China and said, These growing number of rich men are ready to pay any
amount if you pack these things nicely and paste a label saying that it is a wild product
and makes you vigorous.
As the everyday practices of mushroom collectors and contractors demonstrate, the sim-
ultaneous existence of the possibility for both commercial and subsistence production
serves two purposes: it curtails (and claims to alleviate) damage caused by commercializa-
tion, and it legitimizes commercial production by generating income for individual and
community ends. Such reinvented systems of production in community forestry,
however, are not a formal subsumption of labor under capital (Marx 1967), because,
instead of subsuming social relations and subsistence means of livelihood into capitalist
production, their conditions of existence are continuously reproduced. Nor is it simply
an accumulation by dispossessing people from the commons (Harvey 2003). In fact,
these reinvented forms of production in community forestry consistently provoke commu-
nity ownership, inclusion and leadership in producing commodities.

Local alliance of dominance

As an immediate outcome of the long history of community forestry interventions such as
capacity building, network development and entrepreneurship, alliances between traditional
power centers and the traders have emerged, providing for a crucial turn in commercializa-
tion. Alliances have emerged between community elites, contractors and government of-
cials. These informal networks of powerful actors have been vital in producing technical
plans, getting community endorsement and involving community members in harvesting
12 Dinesh Paudel

Figure 1. Distribution of benets (in USD) from timber commercialization in Dang district, Nepal.8
Source: value chain analysis of timber trade by the author in 2012.

and trading forest products. This has satised the interests of all participants: (1) for com-
munity elites, taking leadership and earning additional income; (2) for government ofcials,
maintaining control over commercial distribution and gaining personal nancial benets
(bribes) with fewer legal and social risks; and (3) for contractors, increasing prots in
less time.
The commercial alliances were formed by mobilizing the social heterogeneity in terms
of agricultural land holding, caste, gender, power and education, within and immediately
outside the community groups. Local communities are not homogenous, and members of
the local upper class, who claim to represent whole communities, hold an interest in alli-
ances with contractors and commercial companies that ultimately benet them. Heterogen-
eity is necessary for capital to become dominant in setting priorities, both for management
of forest resources and for its appropriation. As heterogeneity is continuously reproduced in
communities, the conditions for accumulation are simultaneously reproduced. In this
process, various interests and ideas, such as forestry science, government policies, develop-
ment ideas and participatory approaches, facilitate the interactions that foster long-term col-
laborations. These alliances ensure the uninterrupted ow of commodities with active
participation of community members in the production processes.
Such alliances are sustained by informal sharing of the distribution of benets: commu-
nity elites gain increased control, government ofcials receive bribes and traders enjoy
prots (see Figure 1 above). These alliances are well institutionalized in the Terai
region of Nepal with a clear division of the role and responsibility of each actor. The
amount to be paid as a bribe is negotiated every year, and the amount varies depending
on the negotiating power of the community elites and forest ofcials. These alliances are
built to supply the Sal timber to urban areas. Timber production is one of the biggest indus-
tries in Nepal and Sal timber is exclusively consumed by urban upper classes. Community
members know about the growing market value of the timber. But the entire value chain is
almost undecipherable for them as the actors involved in the alliance interact informally,
making it hard to recognize how they operate in everyday activities. These informal and
often invisible alliances are capable of co-opting resistance at local level. For example, cri-
ticisms of entrepreneurial uses of community forestry that do not benet poor people in the
hilly region culminated in massive plantations of cash crops on poor peoples land. This
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 13

new move compensated poor people by introducing income-generating activities.

However, these additional activities both legitimized capital accumulation from the
forests and served as another source of prot for the traders.
The effectiveness of the alliance depends on how the benets from the timber trade are
distributed among the actors involved. The surge in timber prices in Kathmandu (from
USD45 per cubic foot in 2012 to more than USD65 per cubic foot in 2014) has strengthened
the alliance-building process. This price hike in urban areas, mainly due to the inuence of
informal cartels and the creation of articial shortages, has also increased the share of prots
to community funds and local elites. These increased benets incentivize everyone
involved in the alliance to create favorable conditions for commercialization, and this prep-
aration starts right from the beginning of the development of forest management plans.
Forest technicians, with the help of community members, measure the growth rate and
yearly harvestable quantity of the forest. The contractors operate from behind the scenes
and inuence forest ofcials to show higher growth rate and harvestable quantity. This
technical manipulation allows the contractors to legally harvest increased quantities of
timber every year. Technically, the increased stock of the forest indicates that more trees
need to be harvested. Local elites benet from the increased quantity, and also community
members without knowing the technical aspect of this manipulation perceive the
increased growth as an opportunity for more income for community development. Forest
management plans are approved in the community general assembly, and the timber har-
vesting schemes are implemented annually.
The contractor coordinates the overall harvesting operations, which includes selecting
trees to harvest, employing community members for logging, clearing the paperwork and
arranging transportation. The workers receive about USD1 per cubic foot of timber,
which includes both logging and loading into the truck. The contractors pay the bribe
and taxes before they harvest the trees, but they pay the workers wages and community
royalties at the end of the season (the average amount paid per cubic foot is shown in
Figure 1). They mobilize middlemen to manage logging and transportation operations if
the forest size is small and located far away from the district headquarters. Middlemen
are crucial to operationalize the everyday activities of the alliance. They know the geogra-
phy and community dynamics, which are crucial elements in designing effective harvesting
plans and involving everyone in this process. Since everyone involved in the alliance
benets even the workers get additional income from the wage and also branches,
leaves and leftovers the scheme of commercial harvesting continues with communities
taking more responsibility for rejuvenating the forest and producing timber.
But such alliance-building is not monolithic or straightforward. In every transaction, the
process of building alliances must reproduce legitimacy and acceptance among the actors
involved. Even though every actor receives benets from being a part of the alliance, the
share of benets is extremely skewed (Figure 1). To increase the share of the total
benet, each actor mobilizes its constituency as a force for renegotiation and revitalization
of its importance in commercialization. For example, community elites mobilize commu-
nity members as a collective force if they feel that their share is not appropriate. They
may obstruct, delay, produce low quality or reduce quantity to reassert their position and
power for getting more benets. The actors must invoke the community rights of common-
ing to constantly renegotiate and sustain the alliance. In fact, community forestry repeatedly
mobilizes the idea of alliance-building as a necessary instrument for long-term commoning
and commercialization.
The collective strength developed around commoning sometimes resisted the alliances
exploitation of timber. Internal contradictions and competitions within the alliance also
14 Dinesh Paudel

weakened the informal system that was institutionalized in commercialization. The local
Maoists became a new element in the alliances, taking their share of the benets. During
the Maoist revolution of the 1990s, commercialization of timber was a main source of
income for Maoists in the Terai area. These alliances continued even after the Maoists
came to peaceful politics in 2006. Such renewed alliances of the Maoists with the national
and international forces of capital and power have already created ssures in their hege-
mony, leading to splits and distancing of the peasants from reinvented bourgeoised poli-
tics of the post-revolution Maoist party. Alliance-building, however, remains a priority in
Nepals community forestry and is now renamed multi-stakeholder networking (Ojha
2014), with the idea of generating collaborations among multiple and differentiated inter-
ests and actors at all levels. Consequently, these alliances (rather than capitallaborer
relations) have played a decisive role in dening the scale and protability of commercia-
lization in community forestry.

Small producers as local capitalists

A central aspect of commercialization in community forestry was the development of local
entrepreneurs capable of mobilizing communities and building market alliances. Commu-
nity forestry trained local entrepreneurs, investors, middlemen, contractors and lenders,
who represented a capitalist class at the community level. This process channeled the
goods from the forests into commodity circuits and also enrolled other public and private
goods into the system of commercialization. In addition, this shift was vital in changing
behaviors of community members to produce more, to be vigilant about other members
and to protect resources from extraction. In reality, the Kathmandu-based companies
face difculty in gaining access to community resources directly without developing part-
nerships with community elites and contractors. The transfer of required entrepreneurial
skills and linkages to the local level has taken a series of interventions and reworked the
livelihood strategies of the selected individuals.
The story of Chitrakali Magar illustrates how these processes operate on an individual
level. Chitrakali, who lives in a market center in the Pyuthan district (where most of the
hemp bers from the Rolpa area are supplied), was a poor peasant from a remote village
on the north side of the Rapti River.

My daily routine used to be working at home for the family in the morning, and, during the day,
I had to work as a farm laborer almost every day. But I spend every evening and sometime night
to produce hemp and Allo bers (Himalayan nettle). Some unknown contractors used to collect
them and pay me after some months,

she said. Those bers were in high demand in the cities, but the contractors in the regional
market centers and Kathmandu faced acute shortages of reliable producers and middlemen
who would guarantee the supply. The Poverty Alleviation Program selected Chitrakali as a
potential trader, and, after various trainings, exposure and entry to the commercial alliance,
she is now a successful entrepreneur who supplies most of the products from the upper
Rapti region to Kathmandu-based traders.
Chitrakali was gloried as an example of change and a model of progress. Reports,
pamphlets, documentaries and site visits made her known to national and international audi-
ences. Now she runs a ber-processing factory, along with her collection center. One of her
sons lives in Kathmandu and supplies goods to traders. She owns a house, restaurant and
shop, and her investment in other businesses has grown tremendously. Nonetheless, her
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 15

entrepreneurial success demonstrated to other ber producers just how much they were
exploited locally.

I know how much to pay, and in what ways to give them their salaries. I have gone through that
by myself. I also know what they would buy from that money. Most times, I just give them
goods they need from my shop as their salary,

Chitrakali said, describing her prot-making scheme from the bers.

However, the development of local capitalists was also mixed up with the local subsis-
tence system of production. There was no need for fully involved traders at the local level.
Their role in commercialization was only to consolidate community-level investment and to
facilitate the supply chain. Therefore, the new entrepreneurs (capitalists) continued to be
involved in traditional, feudal, land-based production, such as tenant farming and money
lending. The local entrepreneurs beneted tremendously from these schemes because of
their increased control over double sources of income as they enjoyed the benets from
both systems of production. At the same time, it became a source of confrontation as the
gap between the new entrepreneurs and peasant producers increased every year.

The notion of self-reliance

The idea of self-reliant development played a central role in involving communities in com-
mercial production, especially in communities with abundant high-value products, such as
Sal timber in the Terai. As a part of the government contracts, all community groups must
develop operational plans for community development. These could target school build-
ings, teacher salaries, cash-crop production, micro-hydro, roads, trails, small irrigation,
drinking water or small-scale industry. Forest user groups are considered resource-rich
communities with access to products that could generate income from commercialization.
As they are expected to nance such development initiatives themselves under the neolib-
eral philosophy of self-reliance and sustainability, commercialization proposals are
endorsed with enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility. Here, communities involvement
in commodity production becomes urgent and naturalized as way of generating community
betterment, equating commercialization with development.
However, subsistence modes of production in lagging sectors have simultaneously been
characterized as community development. All in all, community groups spend more than 50
percent of their funds in community development (Paudel, Khatri, and Paudel 2010).6 Some
of their funds go toward rejuvenating forests. The main objectives of such investment have
been to prepare community members to generate local economic growth and also to create
skillful labor power for commercial production. The investments are made under labels
such as income generation, entrepreneurship, community infrastructure, forest conservation
and plantation, commercial harvesting, CFUGs institutional strengthening and supplying
forest products.
However, the relationship between community development and commercialization is
not always self-evident (the road shown in Figure 2 was built using community funds, but it
is used mainly for timber transportation). For example, this story of a contractor shows that
the idea of development allows communities to commercialize swiftly. The contractor,

6
In 2009, CFUGs invested $5.71 million in such activities, with the highest priority on infrastructure
facilities to ease the transportation of forest products (Paudel, Khatri, and Paudel 2010).
16 Dinesh Paudel

Figure 2. Timber transportation from a community forest in Dang.

Source: author.

from Kathmandu, has been a well-connected timber trader in the Dang district for at least 10
years. For him, maintaining good relationships and establishing nancially lucrative con-
tacts with forest ofcials and community leaders are not enough. The contractor describes
his commercial strategies:

We use the idea of community development to enter to the communities as an entry to prepare a
good deal. We invest for various community-development activities, mainly the road, before
we nally extract the timber. We always try to ensure that the timber transportation
becomes easier after the road is constructed but at the same time give impression that we
are contributing to local development. In return, we cut the trees. The prot margin is very
high if you can balance everything well.

The contractors thus invest in community development before the actual business agree-
ments to informally secure their rights to harvest the timber. Most of these activities are
implemented to fulll the interests of local elites and also increase their access to develop-
ment facilities. As commercialization requires approval from the community group in every
harvesting season, it is through the idea of community development that the possibility of
commercial production is generated.
Community development activities are geared toward generating the conditions of
possibility for market-based livelihood opportunities at the local level. They simultaneously
reproduce and transform traditional naturesociety relationships and subsistence economic
practices into entrepreneurial and market-friendly forms of production.7 Community devel-
opment, however, does not displace peasants from the collective ownership of the
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 17

commons; rather, the peasants are actively involved in community forestry activities as
development beneciaries. In predominantly agrarian societies such as that of Nepal, full
dispossession of peasants from the commons would be unprotable as the reproduction
of the stock of the commons is impossible without community care, especially with geo-
graphically scattered resources, such as forests.

Politics of scientic forestry

Community forestry uses commercialization as a natural response to appropriate the forest
stock. The central message has been that, when the stock of the forests exceeds the
minimum required level, it needs to be cut and sold. Nevertheless, what counts as
growth and which products are assigned value are different from indigenous ways of inter-
acting with forest ecosystems. Scientic forestry techniques are deployed with an emphasis
on producing high-value timber and other protable products. Community members are
encouraged to collect non-commercial products to satisfy subsistence needs. At the same
time, the harvesting of non-commercial species serves the purpose of weeding for the
growth of commercial timber. This arrangement has reduced the cost of production
because commercial companies never pay for the investment by community members,
especially poor families, to protect, manage and grow forest resources for generations. It
is extracted without compensation. Some rich people in the community also benet from
not paying for raw materials, as some become entrepreneurs and develop partnerships
with companies. The community as a group continues managing and growing forests
voluntarily because individuals are allowed to use less-productive products such as leaf
litters, barks, grasses and dead woods. Forestry science labels forest species into valuable
and less-valuable categories. Economic protability is the basis of categorization where
species with higher market values fall under scientic management, and commercially
less-protable ones are used for subsistence.
For example, Sal and Dhagero trees require the same growing conditions. They are
dominant species in most of the lowland Terai forests. Dhagero is the undergrowth of
Sal forests, occupying the lower canopy. Easily climbed with their spreading branches
and lower height, Dhageros are used by women as a main source of goat fodder. Branches
are easily cut for rewood. The Sal trees grow higher and are used mainly for timber. Men
are usually employed to harvest these trees, creating a key source of income for contractors,
workers and elites, as well as for the state and market. Forestry science, however, identied
Dhagero trees as weeds for the growth of valuable Sal trees. Weeding out Dhageros made
the forest more productive. However, this practice not only destabilized the local system of
farming and food, as goats were primary sources of livelihoods for women, but it jeopar-
dized regeneration of the Sal trees. Sal seeds can germinate for only 24 hours after
falling to the ground. Dhagero leaves provided protective cover while seeds germinated,
and later sheltered young plants. Women now collect the less-palatable fodder of Sal
trees, and the number of goats per family has decreased substantially.
All these aspects come together to institutionalize commercial relationships between
forest dynamics and the communities. In community forestry, peasant communities are

7
New institutional economists (NIE) have argued that the commons is governable under market mech-
anisms, but it requires reinventing community institutions to ensure exclusive entitlements over the
resources with the rights of limiting the number of appropriators (see Ostrom 1990; Agrawal 1996;
Hobley 1996).
18 Dinesh Paudel

encouraged (empowered) to own the decision-making, and legal and political entitlements
of the common forests are transferred from the state to communities (Agrawal 1996; Li
2010). This has generated new subjectivities of communities as collective owners of pro-
duction processes rather than individuated wage-laborers, by articulating economic,
environmental and livelihood necessities. In this way, accumulation via community forestry
in Nepal is no longer driven only by the direct, physical production of commodities, but is
instead reproduced by generating and naturalizing particular commercial relations and sub-
jectivities. Community forestry achieves this hegemony by reproducing a collective subjec-
tivity of the commoners (peasant community groups) in which commercial activities are
incorporated into everyday community practices. In this process, community groups are
reinvented as organized producers rather than free-dwelling commoners (Subedi et al.
2002). In Nepals community forestry, the commercial articulation of peoples desperate
livelihood necessities, micro-politics of alliance-building, creation of a local entrepreneurial
class, idea of self-help development and authority of scientic forestry knowledge collec-
tively materialize the processes of commercialization.

Conclusion
This case shows that community forestry may enable accumulation without dispossession,
where both subsistence and commercial productions are maintained, and local capitalist
classes such as entrepreneurs, contractors and loan lenders are promoted. The additional
layer of contractors lets capital counter local resistance more easily, and it sets in motion
micro-processes of uneven development (cf. Smith 1984; Harvey 1985), which together
facilitate capital accumulation at the local level.
Accumulation without dispossession is a form of capital accumulation that is entwined
with the everyday practices of commoning. In this process, reproducing community collec-
tive rather than individuated wage-laborers in appropriating the commons becomes integral
to commodity circuits. Accumulation without dispossession retains some features of primi-
tive accumulation including accumulation from the wealth created by other modes of pro-
duction (for example, stock of common forests). However, this mode of production is not
primitive accumulation since laborers are not separated from the means of production and
there is no transition to wage-based commodity production. Accumulation without dispos-
session is specic because commodity production articulates everyday subsistence prac-
tices as autonomous spaces and the commodity production as a necessary step towards
expanding community control and self-reliant development.
Marxs concept of primitive accumulation and its further explanation by Marxist scho-
lars can be understood differently from the political economy of the commercialization of
the reinvented commons. Primitive accumulation is an ongoing phenomenon in the global
South, especially in the commons (de Angelis 2003; Bond 2007). Analysis of the case of
community forestry in Nepal provides useful elaborations that could be further researched
and used to understand the emerging patterns of accumulation in the commons. First, the
conditions for accumulation are possible without privatizing material resources for individ-
ual ownership. Direct producers can be mobilized for capital accumulation within their indi-
genous resource practices by introducing capital ow in alliances with community elites
(emerging capitalists) without changing ownership entitlements.
Second, in analyses of accumulation and commodication of the commons, nature
(forests) is not an aggregated single entity but rather a set of innumerable values that
satisfy innumerous human needs. Until all components are commodied and separated
from direct producers, which is less likely to happen in the commons because of the
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 19

resistance and the associated costs, accumulation without dispossession remains a dominant
political economic feature of peasant communities. An important sign of this process is that
peasant communities are leveraged for accumulation rather than dispossessed from the
commons. In this viewpoint, accumulation can be understood from the perspective of the
rearticulated relationship of capital and the commons rather than from the linear logic of
displacement and enclosure. This emerging situation does not replace ideas of primitive
accumulation and accumulation by dispossession; rather, it provides insights from a par-
ticular instance of accumulation in the commons where commercialization and commoning
co-exist. In community forestry, timber and other valuable products are commodied, but
leaf litters remain available for subsistence. These new aspects of accumulation might
provide us with different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the reinvented
commons and peasant politics.
Subsistence economy is juxtaposed as the opposite of the commodication of agrarian
economy. However, it is important to recognize that the conditions for the existence of sub-
sistence economy and the commodication of lives and means of production are reproduced
simultaneously, co-constituting each other as a result of developments double roles. As
argued elsewhere (Sanyal 2007; Chatterjee 2008), development programs must address
the basic survival of the victims of primitive accumulation, including the peasantry,
while promoting capitalist growth. The reinvention of subsistence production not only miti-
gates the potentially devastating economic and political repercussions of capitalist accumu-
lation, but also makes accumulation cheaper and more acceptable from the outset, facilitating
its entry into agrarian societies. Therefore, in capitalist accumulation via development,
primary producers (especially peasants) provide subsidized labor-power for capital accumu-
lation, but they are simultaneously supported with basic survival needs by the state and ancil-
lary developmental programs. This double-sided thrust of development secures legitimacy
for initiatives that enroll communities in the commercialization of the commons (land,
forest). The net result is a curious phenomenon of accumulation without dispossession.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Vinay Gidwani, Eric Sheppard, Abdi Samatar, Joel Wainwright,
George Henderson, Jennifer Fluri, Paul Jackson, Brian Burke, the editors of JPS and the two anon-
ymous reviewers for their generous comments and advice.

Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

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Dinesh Paudel is an assistant professor in the Department of Sustainable Development at Appala-

chian State University, North Carolina, USA. His ethnographic research explores the relationship
between development interventions, environmental changes and political transformations in Nepal
and the Himalayas. Email: paudeld@appstate.edu