Festival-Based Governance of Indigenous Agrobiodiversity: Millets, Handlooms, and Community Resource Management in Odisha, India

Festivals in Odisha, India, operate as informal institutional architectures governing indigenous agrobiodiversity and artisanal resource chains, revealing fundamental patterns in human-environment interactions. Drawing on common-pool resource theory and social-ecological systems frameworks, this paper analyses three ritual cycles, Burlang Yatra (millet biodiversity), Bali Yatra (maritime resource knowledge), and Thakurani Yatra (handloom production), as governance mechanisms regulating access to, conservation of, and knowledge transmission concerning indigenous natural resources. Ethnographic observation and archival analysis (2018–2023) reveal that festival-based institutions function as appropriation rules within common-pool resource systems, mediating tensions between traditional agricultural practices and neoliberal market pressures. Ritual cycles sustain millet agrobiodiversity through seed exchange networks governed by reciprocity norms, maintain sericulture value chains through guild-like quality enforcement, and preserve maritime ecological knowledge through commemorative practice. However, feminist political ecology analysis exposes gendered power asymmetries, caste-based exclusions, and differential access patterns shaping who benefits from these arrangements. The paper contributes to human ecology by demonstrating how cultural performance constitutes environmental governance in human-dominated ecosystems, and to conservation scholarship by illuminating pathways through which indigenous communities maintain agrobiodiversity under agricultural modernisation.