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Sammanfattning

Nepal's community forestry program is widely regarded as successful. At its peak, the program enlisted a large share of the rural population as managers of the country's communal forests. However, recent empirical evidence suggests that voluntary participation in the program is in decline. Analyzing the empirical literature, we describe this surprising pattern of decline and discuss potential negative impacts. We also use political-economic reasoning and extant evidence to theorize about the drivers of this decline, arguing that livelihood diversification and profitable out-migration have altered the forest-people relationship in many villages, weakening incentives for participation in community forestry. Finally, we assess the viability of several institutional options for either replacing the program with other management approaches or reforming it to boost incentives for participation in light of the noted socioeconomic changes in rural Nepal. We argue that well-designed payment schemes or reforms that enable local people to commercialize community forests could both support participation by enhancing the associated benefits, and institutional changes related to local meetings and labor requirements could do so by reducing the associated costs. The replacement of community-based approaches with top-down management or privatization, however, appears risky due to a potential lack of government capacity and the possibility that such institutional changes could damage livelihoods or create negative externalities for some households. The consolidation of community forests also presents governance and management challenges. Our analysis suggests the need for greater scholarly attention to how environmental policy tools withstand social and economic change and to environmental policy succession-or how environmental policies are reimagined when they are no longer an appropriate fit for the local context.

Nyckelord

Forestry; Development; Participation; Community-based natural resource management; Nepal

Publicerad i

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene
2025, volym: 13, nummer: 1, artikelnummer: 00059
Utgivare: UNIV CALIFORNIA PRESS

SLU författare

UKÄ forskningsämne

Miljövetenskap
Utvecklingsstudier

Publikationens identifierare

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2024.00059

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/144889