The early 1990s witnessed an apparent sea-change in government attitudes towards the management of commonpool resources (CPR) in India and elsewhere. The state, hitherto controlling and managing most CPR such as forests and water bodies in a paternalistic manner, appeared finally to have opened its doors to people’s participation. In forestry, within seven years of the historic 1990 directive from the Government of India, 17 States had issued orders enabling ‘joint forest management’ (JFM). Several States had, with bilateral/multilateral funding, initiated forest sector projects with JFM as the stated cornerstone in all of them. Seminars, workshops, and training programmes on JFM abounded (and continue to do so). A little later,2 the irrigation sector saw a similar, albeit less pervasive and publicised, transition not only in the management of tanks and lift irrigation (‘minor’ irrigation) but even in the management of canal irrigation. Phrases like ‘participatory irrigation management’ (PIM) or the more explicit‘irrigation management turnover’ (IMT), have attained the same status in irrigation management as that of JFM in forestry. They are the new buzz words, the essential components of all sectoral reform programmes or development projects. ‘Joint management’, ‘co-management’, or ‘shared management’ is, it seems, the shape of things to come in public policy on natural resource management in general (Poffenberger and McGean, 1996). Although acronyms, government orders and programmes abound, and many non- overnmental activist and advocacy groups have shed their initial scepticism and joined in the implementation of these programmes, the picture on the ground is not that rosy. After the initial hyperbole, progress has in many cases been slow, or has resulted in potentially unsustainable outcomes (e.g. Saxena t al., 1997; Tiwari, 1998). This gap between rhetoric and reality is prompting re-examinations of JFM in different ways: typically institutional analyses of the structure of JFM or sociological analyses of ‘community’ itself. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine assumptions regarding the state itself, focusing on the factors potentially responsible for the recalcitrant implementation of joint management. It is therefore an attempt to explore ‘the game behind the rules’ rather than the ‘rules of the game’ of participatory resource management. An analytical framework is first outlined, followed by examples from the forestry and irrigation sectors in different Indian States.