The forests of West Bengal have recently come under a comanagement initiative called Joint Forest Management. This paper will examine changing forestry regimes in southern West Bengal since the 1930s to suggest that the redefinition of forest management in the region since the mid 1980s cannot adequately be explained in terms of property rights. The nature of village community, overlapping jurisdictions of different agencies and groups in forest management, and the nature of expertise qualifying the scope of jurisdictions-that of foresters and villagers-are intersecting issues that have to be analyzed to understand the institutional politics of comanaging natural resources worldwide.