From the economic perspective, livelihood increment has been an important strength of CF in Nepal. Forests can provide both direct benefits which include food, timber, fuelwood, fodder, saleable products, construction materials, bedding for animals, medicines and leaf-litters whereas the indirect benefits like watershed management, enhanced soil fertility, erosion control and windbreaks provide ecological services (Thoms 2008). When community and the forest are
collectively managed together then contribution of forests towards livelihood became reliable and stable and the perfect example of this is CF in Nepal.
The establishment of micro-credit schemes has been one of the financial capital sources in many CFUG of Nepal. Almost each CFUG administers a communal fund and create a microcredit where interested CFUG member can deposit certain amount and can borrow money for income generating activities with low interest or without interest as finalized by the CFUGs themselves.
As per the CFUG guidelines, preference should be given to women, disadvantage people and pro-poor households and after that to those who had not borrowed any money before. This scheme has been advantageous to women and pro-poor because it was very hard for them to get small loans from the bank but by the establishment of this micro-credit, they can borrow money which is generally required to start income generation activities like vegetable farming, goat and pig rearing, grocery (Dev et al. 2003). These funds were collected from the annual income of CF and also from doner agencies and after that they used it as a revolving fund. Apart from this, CFUG in Nepal are generating income through selling of NTFPs, timber, wood, effective management of natural resources, biodiversity conservation, eco-tourism and establishment of homestay.
Along with its strengths, ad-hoc management and underutilization of CF in Nepal have been found to be the major weaknesses. There were forest management activities like weeding, plantation, etc., which can be taken as an indicator of active forest management, but these activities are not so well planned in CFUGs of Nepal. The decision-making process are still on traditional basis by the CFUGs committee that might lacks enough technical knowledge. Therefore, CFUG needs technical support to strategic planning and better understanding of the potential of sustainable forest management. Another common problem seen in the CFUG Committees, which manages forest management activities, is the coordination and unity of all forest users. This may be due to the lack of a representative from all the tole (communities in Nepal comprises of small areas called tole) who can effectively coordinate with the users of their own tole. Most of the successful CFUGs in Nepal use a system of tole representatives or ultra-poor households with payment to do the forest weeding. Forest management plans and activities are well included in formally agreed Operational Plans (OPs). However, in practice it is different. The specific objectives of the average CFUG are usually not defined in the operational plan, which often cause confusion within the CFUG regarding planning and implementation of forest management. Moreover, OPs of the most of the
CFUGs in Nepal are not updated leading to passive implementation. Many of the CFUGs divided their forests into blocks, which can be seen in their forest map, as per the suggestion from forest division. In fact, some of the CFUGs are not even aware about the importance and purpose of blocking and so, it is obvious that forest resources are under-utilized. Hence, CFUG forest management activities in operational plan and in actual ground have still some gaps and that is causing ad-hoc management and underutilization of CF in Nepal.
Forest products are one of the great assets for poverty alleviation in Nepal. Thus, the current issue is to find out the potential as well as possible economic benefits of forest products and what are their contributions to the poor’s households in CFUG. To understand the role of CF in local people’s life, it is important to estimate the economic contribution from the forest resources and to find out the benefit sharing among the CFUGs. The study supports forest-based enterprise as an important opportunity of CF in Nepal. The establishment of small-scale enterprises based on local forest resources, local knowledge and the availability of a local market could be an appropriate option for eliminating poverty. Subedi (2006) believes that community forests that are oriented toward enterprises, can be more fruitful from both conservation and livelihood increment. The study too echoes with this research and showed that enterprise-oriented CF could be the potential approach for sustainable development.
In 2008, total contribution from the forest was around 4.3 percent among which 2.5 percent accounts for forest-based enterprises in Nepal (FAO 2011). Previous studies have shown that CF not only contributes towards forest management but also other socio-cultural, institutional strengthening, livelihood and other various sectors (Kanel & Niraula 2004, Pokharel et al. 2007).
Small-scale forest enterprises, especially community forestry enterprises, have traditionally been a tool of sustaining community life in Nepal. Several literatures showed that doing business in CF based enterprises create benefits to their users and these small-scale enterprises are considered as an important asset for economic growth of CFUGs (Subedi et al. 2002) while also improving good governance, rural development and natural resources conservation (Subedi et al. 2002). At this stage, we can see the increasing interest of local people, government and other stakeholders in forest-based enterprises because of its potential benefits in terms of economic, employment opportunities, technological advancement and ecological benefits simultaneously. To be more specific, various factors such as the forest regeneration, community forestry guidelines
improvement, higher willingness of CFUGs to try novelties and livelihood increment friendly policies are the major reasons behind it (FAO 2018).
Economically, the greatest threats of CF in Nepal are the illegal trading of forest products. Forest governance has become a major challenge in Nepal. In spite of well-defined forest guidelines and policies, poor governance can be seen among majority of CFUGs. Due to lack of accountability, transparency, responsibility, regular meetings, monitoring and weak and inconsistent law enforcement have invited opportunities for corruption and illegal trade. Many stakeholders have active interest and involvement in community forestry and the debate over its management regimes brings controversies and disagreement. For instance, there is ongoing debate between sustainable and scientific forest management approach due to which conflicts between groups and individuals can be seen. Because of these conflicts and poor governance, illegal trade and encroachment in the community forest are increasing.
In Nepal, there is lack of data and information regarding illegal activities in community forestry.
However, there are some official investigative studies, reports, and anecdotal proofs that helps to point out tentative ideas of seriousness of illegal logging. Moreover, lack of technical knowledge and appropriate commercial practice in the management and utilization of forest resources are promoting favorable situation for traders and they seem to have taken full advantage of it. Due to lack of transparency and predictability, and to widespread allegations of corruption, forestry sector in Nepal is often looked with suspicion by authorities and decision makers. It is still up for debate and has not been fully documented and disseminated.
4 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Over the past four decades, community forestry processes in Nepal have continuously expanded – in terms of quantity, area and the number of households involved. In this long journey CF seems to have positive contribution towards social, economic and ecologic development of forest-dependent households and their environment. Behind this success there are various institutional innovations, policy formulations, and evolving practices that promote equal access to forest products, livelihood opportunities, strengthening of local institutional capacity, and ecological development (Dev et al. 2003, Ojha & Pokharel 2005, Subedi 2006, Pokharel et al. 2007).
According to DoF (2018), there were more than 22 thousand community forests in Nepal covering more than 2.2 million ha area and 2.9 million households as user groups who have the responsibilities of utilization, conservation and management of forest resources. However, according to the literature, the results are not consistent among Nepal's forest communities. Some evidence shows that there is negative impact on poor households though forest quality was increased (Malla 2000). Thus, it is very necessary to look all the aspects of CFUGs before evaluating which might further effect in decision making process. Hence, the study aims to evaluate overall strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities of community forestry in Nepal. To make the outcomes more specific, the research was analyzed from the three aspects of sustainability; social, economic and ecologic.
The community forestry program in Nepal has been a successful tool to forest regeneration and improved middle hills situation (Springate-Baginski & Blaikie 2003, Kanel 2006), which was the major goal of its formation. This study also shows that biodiversity conservation and increase in forest area as well as in growing stock are the major strengths of community forestry in Nepal in terms of ecological perspective. At both the regional and national levels, there is an issue of complete monitoring and evaluation. Although the country has the National Community Forestry Database, it is not very active and doesn’t have sufficient and updated information. Some data can be found made by donor agencies but they are limited to specific project areas and it also differs to their particular interests of those agencies.
At the wider scale, community forestry approach is regarded fruitful, though issues of passiveness of executive committee, lack of proper documentation and management effectiveness exist despite some improvements from the early years of implementation. Growing concern of local government
and politicians and community mobilization can bring better opportunities for the CF. Along with the political mobilization and increasing consciousness of local people about governance and democratization, the active participations in Community Forestry can be observed.
From this study, it can be assumed that strengths and opportunities of CF in Nepal have dominancy over its weaknesses and threats. But it does not mean that we should ignore the weaknesses and threats, instead we can minimize the negative aspects along with maximizing its positive aspects for sustainable development. Community forestry cannot be fully functional with its strengths and opportunities when its weaknesses and threats are increasing continuously. Therefore, it is important to adopt some strategies to mitigate these negative aspects. A lot of similar studies have been done which should be considered by the CFUGs, government and related stakeholders during decision making.
The study supports the earlier perception on CF and analyzed that community forestry is playing significant role in sustainable development with positive outcomes in terms of social, economic and ecological aspects. The respondents believe that it will continue to grow in the coming days regardless of any uncertainties in the priority. It can be seen in the communities too as community forestry has been providing different livelihood increment opportunities such as conducting income generation activities, creating forest-based enterprises, micro-credit firm etc. to the CFUGs. Although, community forestry was found to have positive effect on average on livelihood (Ojha et al. 2009). Giri & Ojha (2010) in their study point out that livelihood outcomes can be seen parallelly along with improved participation and institutional strengthening. Moreover, visible outcomes can be made if focus can be given to market linkages, women, poor and disadvantaged group and other innovations that can promote livelihood increment in local context.
CF in Nepal is one of the community-based forest management approaches. It has been found very useful in protection, conservation, management and utilization of common property resources by involving local user members who have the customary rights and live around that particular CF.
Though focus is on protection and conservation rather than scientific management and sustainable utilization. Due to migration, urbanization and technological advancement, this system might pose both threats and positive outcomes. To make it sustainable, we must link CF with economic benefits and opportunities - employment generation through transformational and innovative approaches in utilization and management of forest resources including environmental services.
As there are many CFUGs, these require a greater number of forest officials to renew these FOPs, monitoring and technical backstopping which will create more opportunity of employment at private/govt level. Learning and experiences from CF has been very crucial in formation and development of other community organizations like leasehold forest user groups, collaborative forest management groups, buffer zone community forest user groups. In other sectors too (e.g., farmers group, mother groups, conservation committees) the learning has been very important.
There are lot of studies conducted to document different aspects of the CF. The Department of Forests and Soil Conservation also holds national level conference to document and sharing CF's achievements and learning on regular basis. International researchers and organizations have also made different research work and reports to document the results and achievements. However, government has not been able to document how CF has been contributed in total GDP of Nepal along with its contribution to forestry sector. For this, the respondents suggest to conduct the independent research and assessment for valuation of CF's contribution in forestry sector and thereafter its contribution in national GDP. The respondents also suggest to prepare change stories in terms of video documentary, photo stories through compiling different times scales photo point monitoring, success stories and failures in concise from for larger sharing and publishing such materials and reports in different languages as per target audiences in Nepal (e.g., in Tharu, Gurung, Magar and so on language) as well as at global level. For this the government can manage the funding from revenue collected from CFGUs and forestry sectors.
This study suggests a new approach to the decision makers in evaluation of CF through the different dimension of sustainability. There is a growing interest in integrating community-managed forestry as a climate change project, and we can learn more about this relationship, which offers local and global benefits (Sharma et al. 2004). Recently, the government of Nepal signed a multi-million-dollar agreement with the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), a global partnership of governments, business organizations, civil society, and indigenous groups’
organization for reducing emissions by protecting forests. For achieving the target, Nepal will work towards improving management practices in existing community-based forest management.
Likewise, officials plan to transfer national forests to communities that can work on restoring them.
Thus, one of the potential subjects for further studies would be in this sector, changing the threats into opportunities.
During the data collection process, it was observed that government officials and local people are more intended towards direct interview or oral responses rather than written ones. On the contrary, respondents from INGOs and Universities are more likely to go with questionnaire survey.
Therefore, it would be wise to use different data collection method to gain detail and diverse information based on the situation and the preferences of respondents.
It was observed that the application of A’WOT method has been extended to many sectors and situations. The method evolved from Finland and now it has been used all over the world in natural resource management sector. If we look at the last 20-year trend, it can be analyzed that the scope of this method can be expected to increase in coming years, if the drawbacks of these methods could be minimized. SWOT analysis is taught at undergraduate level in many courses, however MCDM methods are rarely taught. Hence, the emphasize should be given to incorporate this hybrid method from the undergraduate level in the universities. Also, these methods should be presented to the managers on all fields. The more will be the experts, the easier it becomes to make people understand the process. As a participatory tool, the combination of method should be simple and effective to more people and situations. In my opinion, this method can have the best utilization in the context of community forest of Nepal where participation is the main governance tool.
Furthermore, this method can also be introduced in the forest institutes of Nepal for the better understanding and utilization of the A’WOT method.
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