Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 3: Adaptiveness and Collaboration in Community Forestry in Nepal • 81
implementation of silvicultural activities increased—all of which may
contribute to forest system health over time.
The interest in long-term sustainability has some potential implications
for forest protection regulations and enforcement and access to forest
products. Protection of forests often limits people’s access to forest products
for subsistence use, which can have obvious livelihood implications 22 . For
example, three of five toles in Manakamana CFUG decided to reduce
fuelwood harvest from the community forest and banned the cutting of
green trees as an investment in long-term forest health and future supplies
of fuelwood. Both our general experiences in community forestry and the
literature suggest that protectionist tendencies can have different impacts
on different stakeholder groups: often the more marginalised stakeholders
bear the greater burdens. Commonly, for example, changes in fuelwood
access tend to impose the greatest cost upon women, the primary fuelwood
collectors, as well as upon poorer households that do not have their own
private lands from which to supplement community forest products. Thus,
unless moderated by attention to equity (as described in the following
paragraph), an adaptive collaborative management approach could
potentially heighten a CFUG’s awareness of forest condition and spark an
increase in protectionist practices that disadvantage vulnerable users.
Thus, the third trend we observed—increased attention to equity in
access to forest products—is critical. By the end of the PAR, users from
marginalised subgroups in all sites expressed satisfaction with the direction
of change in access to forest products (Box 3-6), although not yet with
the total actual distribution of forest benefits. For example, although some
groups made efforts to increase equity of access to timber and fuelwood,
many marginalised users still believed that more needed to be done to
address their needs. Negotiating equitable benefit (and burden) sharing
clearly remains a challenge for all commons governance—and it is critical
to development.