The new language and practices of globalized environmental governance have a complex colonial genealogy. The lecture will delineate some post-colonial continuities and shifts in regulatory, documentary and enforcement practices of biodiversity conservation and wildlife protection in India. The twin processes of nature-making and state-building from the social and territorial margins of the state will be discusses using ethnographic material. These practices involve a complex interplay of state laws, World Bank credit conditionali-ties and various sets of international norms advocated by conservationist and community-based human rights NGOs. The strategies of the cunning state caught between commit-ments to international agencies and grass-roots demands from social movements will be examined in this context. Finally some dilemmas of a decolonization of the imagination in the South will be considered with regard to the transnationalization of law.