Chapter Four - Of green spaces and grey areas: An ethnography of everyday forest management in peri-urban Bengaluru, India.

India's forest landscapes are reeling under severe demographic and developmental pressures. These tensions are particularly pronounced in peri-urban regions that are marked by rapid land use change, weak and overlapping institutions and competing claims on land. This paper examines how rapid urbanization influences place-making and the practice of forest management in Bannerghatta National Park (BNP), India. BNP is an elephant corridor traversing through a human-dominated landscape bordering the megacity of Bangalore. Straying of elephants and leopards into village settlements has led to significant destruction of crops and life. Unregulated real-estate development driven by a boom in the information technology (IT) industry, combined with granite quarries that operate illegally around BNP have altered the characteristics of the surrounding villages. These processes have revealed or created newer forms of inequity that challenge forest institutions to respond ingeniously. Applying concepts from critical institutionalism and ethnography, our research aims to inform policy efforts to incorporate pluralism in sustainable forest management and rural development. Through data collected over 16 months via observation, interviews, and oral histories we examine the workings of forest management institutions in everyday social life. We map specific modes through which four marginalized agents navigate institutional plurality and intersect with each other in the peri-urban forest landscape. The results illustrate the potency of 'institutional bricolage', wherein agents renegotiate their space in the landscape by actively drawing from available resources to ensure workable institutional arrangements, challenging government efforts to conserve and manage ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]