Locally Perceived Social and Biophysical Factors Shaping the Effective Implementation of Community Forest Management Ope
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Locally Perceived Social and Biophysical Factors Shaping the Effective Implementation of Community Forest Management Operations in Nepal Lila Puri1 · Ian Nuberg1 · Bertram Ostendorf2 · Edwin Cedamon1 Accepted: 1 March 2020 © Steve Harrison, John Herbohn 2020
Abstract Despite an ostensibly conducive policy environment in Nepal, community forest management has stagnated at a suboptimal level in delivery of the benefits stipulated in operational plans. This study assesses the current state of forest management against the backdrop of locally relevant factors that influence management strategies in 13 community forests in the mid hill region of Nepal. It adopts a mixed-method approach utilizing data collected from forest inventory and operational plans of these community forests, household survey and focus group discussions. The results reveal that the current state of forest management is very basic and largely confined to bush cutting and removal of low quality trees. We identified three primary factors influencing user groups’ motivation to enhance forest management, namely: livelihood dependency on forests; forest incomes and benefits; and the capacity to technical forest management. Accordingly, there is a low incentive to adopt silvicultural systems to manage forests. Even though timber is considered as the main source of income, its production is constrained by terrain condition, regulatory procedures, accessibility to road and market and inadequate capacity to undertake silviculturebased forest management. The study concludes that the current level of benefits is insufficient to stimulate forest user groups to enhance forest management. We suggest policy imperatives that: (1) promote enterprise-based forest management to increase forest-based incomes; and (2) adopt collaborative action research to experiment and demonstrate beneficial effects of silvicultural systems to increase forest productivity. Keywords Community forestry · Local factors · Forest quality · Forest dependency · Forest management · Operational plans
* Lila Puri [email protected] 1
School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
2
School of Ecology and Environmental Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
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Introduction The central ethos of community forestry is that people living adjacent to the forest organize themselves and take collective responsibility of forest management for their benefits. Consequently, community-based forest management have been featured in policy documents as a strategy for linking forest conservation to the economic prosperity of forest dependent communities in developing countries. The objective of such decentralized forestry programmes is to increase the participation of forest dependent communities in decision making and benefits related to environmental resources (Agrawal and Gupta 2005). Further, it is argued that greater control of local communities over forest resources leads to the sustainable manag
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