Presentation short abstract

Nepal’s community forestry is presented as a story of success, but its ‘scientific’ management has failed to deliver outcomes. Singular focus on technical forestry led to declining biodiversity and dismissing local needs. We suggest reducing state control and empowering people in decision making.

Presentation long abstract

Nepal’s community forestry is typically presented as a story of success. Its management has been built on scientific forestry ideology, with an imperative to make forestry outcomes achievable through management that involves measurement, calculation and regulating forest yield. Drawing on a critical review of over five decades of Nepal’s forest policies and ethnographic field studies this research provides insights on how community forest management driven by a scientific forestry framework and global forest priorities have been designed to control forest outcomes. However, the desire to achieve controllability has not generated anticipated outcomes; rather it has resulted in uncontrollability and subsequent uncertainty. The singular, official focus on expanding forest-cover has come at the expense of local needs and nourishing biodiversity within the forest, thereby changing the character of forests in Nepal.

The operational plan prepared for forest user groups to guide the forest management is a highly bureaucratic exercise, rigid in design but discretionary in practice, which often restricts communities from the management and use of the forests. As a result, forests are gradually turning into either monoculture timber stands or unmanaged, dense ‘jungle’ with reduced biodiversity and local benefits. Further, the emergent forest ecology has created new uncertainties with the decline in local water sources and increased human–wildlife encounters. While the communities have come to regret forest management outcomes, authorities appear oblivious to these concerns. We argue for rethinking the process of development and implementation of operational plans towards making them more operable by reducing technical and bureaucratic control.