India's Forest Rights Act 2006 recognized the 'gram sabha' (village general assembly) as the holder of community forest resource rights (CFRR). This significant provision created a democratic decision-making space for community-led forest management. Maharashtra state further strengthened the CFR-holding gram sabhas through progressive and supportive policies. Enabled as decision-makers, gram sabhas need to take decisions towards, ensuring sustainability, enhancing livelihoods, and fostering democratic processes and retaining the democratic control they have acquired. Gram sabhas in India represent a state of partial decentralization where there is relative autonomy concerning day-to-day decision-making, but is restricted in some ways. For example, they have access to only non-timber forest products (NTFPs) that are not as economically rewarding as timber. Further, they have to operate in political-economic contexts where their limited autonomy is susceptible to external pressures of (neoliberal forms) development. In this thesis, I examined how gram sabhas in Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra engage with these ecological, economic, and governance challenges even within these limitations, as they manage forests under CFR provisions of the FRA.

I use a modified and politicized Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to explain the decision that gram sabhas make in the context of alternative supportive and supressive state policies. Taking the example of tendu (Diospyros melanoxylon Roxb.), perhaps the most economically important and widespread non-timber forest product in the district, I firstly compared alternative ecological and economic choices made by gram sabhas in a supportive policy context. For managing production of tendu leaves, the alternative ecological choices include pruning root sprouts, using ground-level fire, or conservationoriented hands-off management. There are two important considerations for making a choice - firstly, the impact of the management practice on tendu leaf production and the labor costs. higher leaf production than the hands-off management practice, and also using fire - a popularly chosen practice. The ultimate decision to adopt pruning instead of fire depends upon whether the contractual arrangements account for the labor costs involved.

Gram sabhas in Maharashtra also need to choose between alternative marketing institutions for tendu leaves every year. These institutions include the state-led Forest Department model (FD), the state-community hybrid Gram Panchayat model (GP), and the gram sabha collective-led Village Federation model (VF), with gram sabha control over the auctioning process and the day-to-day operations of the leaf collection centers increasing from the FD to the VF model. Using a multi-dimensional economic assessment based on primary and secondary data collection across a large sample of gram sabhas, I find that gram sabhas obtain enhanced livelihood benefits in terms of prices, production, timing and proportion of payment, and administrative costs by adopting the VF model as compared to other models. This outcome is explained by the increased control of gram sabhas in VFs that enables innovation towards increasing efficiency, and accountability in operations. Further, VFs are also able to build productive community infrastructure using funds saved at community-level from marketing of tendu leaves. This explains why, over the past eight years, gram sabhas across Gadchiroli have shifted towards the VF model in overwhelming numbers.

Multiple decisions of the gram sabhas and the village federations (Korchi Mahagramsabha, in particular) addressed concerns beyond those of immediate ecological and economic benefit creation. These decisions included a strong focus on developing a deliberative platform through collective action, improving accountability and inclusiveness of local decisionmaking, building a vision for economic freedom, creating community forest management plans based on local understanding, and creating wide social networks that stretched beyond the local area. I explain these decisions firstly by demonstrating through first hand observation and qualitative data from cases in eastern Maharashtra, that there is a shrinking space for decision-making by gram sabhas due to changing policies of the Maharashtra state. Then, I describe the social mobilization strategies used by the Korchi Mahagramsabha and a member gram sabha to strengthen their role in local forest governance as they resist a proposed iron ore mine. These strategies help build a local understanding about gram sabhabased forest governance which leads to deepening of alternative imaginaries for local development.

This dissertation provides empirical detail to the still scarce literature on post-rights community-based forest governance obtained under the FRA. Further, the dissertation contributes to the wider literature on democratic, decentralized forest governance by showing that an empowered institution such as a gram sabha can create diverse local benefits and constructively maintain its decision-making space despite inadequacies in supportive policies. Further, it shows the rather than just using a rational choice framework (such as IAD) to explain decisions of gram sabhas that lead to ecological or economic outcomes, it is necessary to adopt an approach where the gram sabhas can be seen through their dual form -as rational and political actors - making choices based on their need to retain their decisionmaking space vis-à-vis state control.