Suchergebnisse

The Community Forestry Program in Nepal is a global innovation in participatory environmental governance that encompasses well-defined policies, institutions, and practices. The program addresses the twin goals of forest conservation and poverty reduction. As more than 70 percent of Nepal's population depends on agriculture for their livelihood, community management of forests has been a critically important intervention. Through legislative developments and operational innovations over three decades, the program has evolved from a protection-oriented, conservation-focused agenda to a much more broadbased strategy for forest use, enterprise development, and livelihood improvement. By April 2009, onethird of Nepal's population was participating in the program, directly managing more than one-fourth of Nepal's forest area. The immediate livelihood benefits derived by rural households bolster strong collective action wherein local communities actively and sustainably manage forest resources. Community forests also became the source of diversified investment capital and raw material for new market-oriented livelihoods. Community forestry shows traits of political, financial, and ecological sustainability, including emergence of a strong legal and regulatory framework, and robust civil society institutions and networks. However, a continuing challenge is to ensure equitable distribution of benefits to women and marginalized groups. Lessons for replication emphasize experiential learning, establishment of a strong civil society network, flexible regulation to encourage diverse institutional modalities, and responsiveness of government and policymakers to a multistakeholder collaborative learning process.

If power relations are not recognized as a problem, even new multidisciplinary approaches to environmental management can end up as simply more sophisticated versions of Western regimes of knowledge and power - and will rarely achieve their stated objective. (DSE/DÜI)

Community management of forests for timber extraction has been widely implemented in Mexico. In this article, we investigate the relationship between property rights, community forestry, and deforestation over time. We conduct an econometric analysis of land use change at the municipality level in eight Mexican states that incorporates several variables commonly used in deforestation models plus variables on common property and community forestry. Our results show that both key explanatory variables, common property and community forestry, are related to lower deforestation. Coniferous forests, which have more marketable timber, show a stronger association, indicating that common property management may work by increasing the market value of the standing forest, thus building local consensus for timber management by distributing returns. The measured effects of common property and community forestry on deforestation rates are both statistically significant and large enough to confirm community forestry's usefulness as an environmental policy tool.

Abstract Community Forestry in Nepal is based on the realm of a decentralized participatory forest management approach. While this approach has a well documented history in addressing socio-economic, governance and environmental issues, the range of challenges still persist in livelihood and equity, governance and socio-ecological aspects. These issues are not only important for community forest user groups, but are equally related to multi-stakeholders, ranging from micro to macro-levels that need to be addressed for the advancement of community forestry in the future. This research, therefore, attempts to assist this process, by concentrating study in forest governance issues from micro to macro-levels, including various stakeholders. The overall aim of this study has been to explore and analyze the effectiveness of community forestry governance in Nepal. This research explores and analyses community forestry governance on two levels: a) at the level of community forest user groups, who are the primary users and managers of community forests; and b) the examination of higher-level stakeholders, including policy makers and service providers for community forestry programmes at national-level. At user group level, research was based on case study approach and the data were collected from three community forest user groups in the western-region of Nepal: Gijara, Shreejana and Bavanpurwa. Household survey interviews, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, participatory observation and workshops were the most commonly applied methods of data collection at the user group level. At the higher stakeholders' level, interviews were carried out with forestry experts working in governmental and non-governmental organizations and with donors working for, and supporting, community forestry programmes. In order to draw a theoretical framework, theories and practices of forest governance, decentralization, institutions and property-right regimes were extensively reviewed. At the user group level, the socio-ecological ...