Community Forestry in Nepal : The Efforts of Aid Projects and Their Involvement with NGOs

Community Forestry (CF) that recognizes local people as forest managers has emerged in the late 1970s as an ideal approach towards both meeting basic need of rural people and sustainable resources utlization for rural development. Since then, this approach in developing countries has been implemented mainly by aid agencies. Despite more than 25 years of experiences, most projects are still struggling to be successful involvement of a local community is definitely essential for successful CF in natural resources management. However, difficulties of leading the Active participation of local people, Sustainability of local people's activities and Self-reliance have been assayed in many project reports as reasons for struggling projects. Most of the previous studies focused on “incentives” or “factors” of participation, sustainability and self-reliance. Despite the most CF have been supported or implemented by aid projects, little studies have discussed about aid projects' approach to lead participation, sustainability and self-reliance. The primary objective of this study was to identify aid projects' approaches towards these issues then to analyze how the approaches are functioning, working currently. Nepal, one of the typical examples of developing countries where CF has been supported by many aid agencies, and has been recognized as one of the succeeding countries on CF, was selected for this study. Chapter 2 discussed the main features of Nepal, the emergence of CF along shift in forest policy, the history and current status of forests, and its utilization. In addition, this chapter focused on relationship between aid projects and forest policies or programs in Nepal. Since the late 1970s, most forest policies and shifts in forest policies in Napal have been influenced by external powers such as bi-multilateral aid agencies. Thus, this chapter showed the importance of the external aid for the forestry sector in Nepal, and the great influence and meaning of the research on approaches of aid project for CF was fully realized. Chapter 3 examined current aid projects and the overall status of CF, and identified several factors for smooth CF expansion. Nepal successfully formed a number of CF in the years following the Master Plan of the Forestry Sector of 1988. The description of the overall situation regarding aid projects in Nepal confirmed the country's clear and consistent CF application process and definition. Consistency has allowed implementation of various CF aid projects based on the same policy, legislation, and operational guidelines that have encouraged collaboration in preventing fragmentation among aid projects. These factors have contributed to smooth and rapid community forest expansion. On the other hand, several issues were clarified. As the number of people or communities aware of CF has increased, the demand for both Forest User Group (FUG) formation and the hand-over of forestland has also increased. Recently, District Forest Officers have been unable to strike a balance between pre-formation and post-formation support for FUGs. The sustainable forest management of established community forests also remains in doubt due to insufficient support for FUGs, signifying that Nepal's CF movement has stagnated. So long as DFOs cannot support FUG's various needs, other institutional involvement is urgently necessary to mitigate this problem. Recently, both the Government of Nepal and aid agencies have started to pay attention to NGOs as partner of intermediary organization to mitigate this problem. In spite of the high expectations for NGOs, the current status of their involvement has not been clarified yet. Therefore, the Chapter 4 was devoted to examine current status and purposes of the involvement of NGOs in bilateral aid projects for CF, and to identify factors that influence different types of NGO involvement. As a result, all six bilateral aid projects for the CF have been recognized and have begun to be integr