Responses to the question of what is wrong with Joint Forest Management (JFM) come in very different, sometimes opposing, forms. Ask the question to foresters, and their response is ‘nothing much’. If on a public platform, they praise the concept of participatory management and the JFM programme that is its manifestation, and list all of its achievements: 1.1 million committees protecting 22.9 million hectares, and regenerating large swathes of the landscape (for example, chapters in Singh et al. 2011). In private, they might admit that many JFM committees are not functional, but they put all that down to implementational failures that are part and parcel of all public programmes. Ask the question to one set of researchers and non-government organizations (NGOs), and their response is likely to be ‘there are a few second-generation issues that need to be sorted out’ (Saigal 2000), and they launch into how the JFM orders need to be fine-tuned, funding agencies need to be more alert, the central government needs to monitor more closely, NGOs need to be more involved, local capacities need to be built further, and so on (Ravindranath and Sudha 2004). But a much smaller group of researchers, along with a much larger group of activists, answer that ‘everything is wrong’, and they point to almost the same features as the others, but in a critical manner: that JFM is based on orders and not the law, that it is heavily funded thereby creating perverse incentives, that it is not joint management at all, or that joint management is not necessary, what is necessary is community forest rights as in the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006.