English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

Forestland reformThe next step then is to recognise structural barriers such as class, caste,ethnicity and gender in common property regimes, and address themboth through policy and legal provisions, procedural arrangements andcreation of the environment both at macro and micro levels that supportinclusion, equality and poverty reduction.6. Implications to state building processAfter the abolition of Nepal’s monarchy in 2006, the CA actually has theopportunity to correct the past mistakes. However, the concept papersrecently prepared by various Thematic Committees of the CA havealso overlooked the existence of community’s property regime. TheCommittees have so far recognised only two types of forests ownership- state and private. Even in the federal republic Nepal, local communitygroups including indigenous communities seem to have only ‘use rights’over forest resources, not the ‘ownership rights’. If the concept note isaccepted and endorsed by the parliament as it is, this will remain as ‘amissed opportunity’ to devolve power to indigenous people and localcommunities. There are number of examples where people near andaround forests are the poorest because their livelihood depends on suchforests, but they are devoid of ‘access’ rights because the ownershiprights of almost all forest land of the country resides with the state. Beinga valuable resource, forest governance has always been a battlefield ofpower and property rights among the state, local communities and privateindividuals. Nepal’s national forests covers 5.8 million hectares (39.4% ofthe country’s 147,000 sq km land), more than two third area of nationalforests are governed by the central government and only less than one thirdarea of the national forests are governed by various types of communitygroups (FRISP 1999; DoF 2005; DoF 2008). These include community,leasehold, buffer zone, collaborative, religious and conservation groups.However, limited rights over forests even in community based forestregimes and restriction of access of local communities to state managedforests have negatively affected their livelihoods. The evidences suggestthat local communities with little private land who lived in and aroundthe state managed forests such as Protected Areas, the poor who have todepend on forests for livelihoods and women who require regular accessto forest products to perform their gender roles have limited optionsto substitute the requirement. Thus, they suffer the most from the lossassociated with the state managed forest (Acharya et al. 2008).122