Community Forestry in Nepal: A Policy Innovation for Local Livelihoods
Hemant R. Ojha, Lauren Persha, and Ashwini Chhatre
Community Forestry in Nepal: An Overview
he Community Forestry Program in Nepal encompasses a set of policy and institutional innovations that empower local communities to manage forests for livelihoods while also enhancing conservation benefits. The program was launched in the mid-1970s as part of an effort to curb the widely perceived crisis of Himalayan forest degradation when the Government of Nepal came to the conclu- sion that active involvement of local people in forest management was essential for forest conservation in the country. Nepal’s Community Forestry Program inno- vations encompass a well-defined legal and regulatory framework, participatory institutions, benefit-sharing mechanisms, community-based forestry enterprises, and biodiversity conservation strategies. The program is considered a global innova- tion in the field of participatory environmental governance (Kumar 2002), and its history of implementation and program evolution usefully illustrates a path toward meeting the twin goals of conservation and poverty reduction (Pokharel et al. 2007; Kanel and Acharya 2008).
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It is worth noting up front that the evidence linking community forestry to improvements in food security is still being accumulated. Despite more than 30 years of innovation in participatory environmental governance through community forestry, the depth and breadth of material on its impact is still somewhat limited, at least in terms of rigorous analysis. There are few comprehensive studies in the academic literature that disentangle the complex causal relationships between com-