Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 3: Adaptiveness and Collaboration in Community Forestry in Nepal • 87
for their sage input throughout the project. Last, but definitely not least, we would like
to acknowledge the tremendous commitment and contributions of the CFUG members
in Manakamana, Andheri Bhajana, Deurali-Bagedanda and Bamdibhir Khoria, the
District Forest Office and FECOFUN staff in Kaski and Sankhuwasahba, and the
many other individuals and organisations at the local, district and national levels that
engaged in the project. The chapter draws further insights from the International
Development Research Centre–funded project of CIFOR and partners ForestAction
and NewERA, entitled Improving Livelihoods and Equity in Community Forestry
in Nepal: The Role of Adaptive Collaborative Management. Again, we thank all
our collaborators. Our gratitude also goes to Bob Fisher and Sally Atwater for their
editorial inputs. The views and any errors in the chapter are solely the responsibility of
the authors.
2 There is no connection between ‘collaboration’ or ‘adaptive collaborative
management’, as we use them here, and the ‘collaborative forest management’ model
being implemented on a trial basis in the Terai (the southern plains of Nepal adjoining
India) by the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation.
3 By social learning, we refer to a process in which ‘multiple stakeholders bring
together their different knowledge, experiences, perspectives, values and capacities for
a process of communication and critical reflection as a means of jointly understanding
and addressing shared challenges and potential options’ (McDougall et al. 2002: 28).
4 Forest Action and NewERA, nongovernmental research organisations, led
the CFUG and district-level research; ERI, a private company, facilitated the nationallevel
research. The latter was a collaborative endeavor of an informal ‘national policy
learning group’ comprising members of government, nongovernmental organisations,
researchers and independent consultants. This project is a part of, and reliant on, a
dynamic network of collaboration at all levels amongst governmental, private, civil
society and bilateral partners in community forestry.
5 DFID and World Bank (2006) base their data on the Nepal Living Standards
Survey II (2003–04).
6 When local governments (such as village development committees and
district development committees) were dissolved, CFUGs also played a significant
symbolic sociopolitical role during this period: after the suspension of elected local and
central government, community forestry—with its locally elected decision-making
bodies—were an important reminder of a hard-won democratic tradition.
7 The caste-based practices were legalised for the entire country in the civil
code of 1854 (Bista 1991) but declared illegal by the New Civil Code of 1963.
8 By ‘meso level’ we refer to the actors, institutions and processes that operate
between the local community forest user group and the national policy-making level.
This is an important intersection of market, civil society and government actors who
individually and jointly influence the governance of the forest commons (Paudel et al.
2006).
9 Agrawal and Ostrom (2001) consider four layers of rights in resource
governance: to use, to manage, to withdraw and to alienate. The last is the highestorder
right, and it refers to activities such as converting forest to agriculture or selling
the forestland. These rights are not granted to CFUGs by the forest law.
10 At the same time, the concept of ‘community’ in community forestry is
intended to include all users of a particular forest (Winrock 2002). Because geopolitical