Recentering the commons: assessing citizen mapping as an environmental practice

The last three decades have seen waves of coastal development paradigms, the most recent being that of ‘blue economy’ and ‘blue growth’ — terms used in conjunction with sustainable development. The blue economy paradigm has its share of discontents across Indian Ocean nations who resist further commodification of coastal spaces and its perverse outcomes in the garb of sustainability. Community-based conservation, citizen mapping of traditional tenure arrangements over coastal commons are emerging counter-strategies in India, to prevent land alienation, and coastal and oceanic ‘grab’. The paper does a reflexive assessment of a case of citizen mapping of coastal commons as a legal pluralistic conservation engagement from India. It examines the effectiveness of such localised collaborative civil society exercises against systemic shifts in coastal protection regimes. It details beneficial practices and knowledge generated by such citizen mapping exercises with reflexive insights for civil society actors. It also critically examines the limitations of such civil society efforts constrained by fixed coastal governance frameworks. The paper argues that Indian coastal regulation law’s built-in iniquities motivate as well as limit civil society efforts to democratise coastal governance. Local actors’ capabilities and social positions themselves further cramp the utility of legal options, making the alienation of the commons all too commonplace under neoliberal environmental governance.