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Abstract:
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"It is now well accepted both in theory and practice that community control over forest has the potential to improve forest condition, while also enhancing livelihood benefits to the communities. However, this lesson is primarily in the context of subsistence livelihoods, and evidence related to whether and how community management can benefit from the emerging markets for diverse forest ecosystem services is still limited. Moreover, there is also a lack of theoretical consensus on whether increased marketing of ecosystem services can contribute to poverty alleviation. These two questions are particularly intriguing, as some studies claim that the access of the poor to natural resources is more secure in the subsistence--based resource management systems than when ecosystem services are promoted in the market. Drawing from 14 case studies of community forestry in Nepal, complemented by review of grey literatures and analysis of secondary data, this paper brings new evidence to demonstrate how communities promote a variety of innovations, marking a shift away from the narrowly focussed, subsistence oriented management to more holistic management of forest ecosystem services. We also show that community forestry groups have adopted diverse management strategies to capitalise on ecosystem services such as those related to ecotourism and watershed conservation. We also demonstrate that increasing commercialization of such services helps to generate multiple benefits to the poor within the community. These innovations are catalysed by a wide range of factors including the transfer of tenure rights and autonomous institutional spaces for collective action as guaranteed by the prevailing forest law. We further demonstrate that, in Nepals case, such ecosystem services innovations have remained limited to most successfully functioning cases of community forestry, and not a common phenomenon. This is because such market--oriented management of ecosystem services is still not a priority of the government forest policy, which takes highly conservative stance towards such innovations. Analysis of the national forest regime indicates that forest policy and bpractice still nurture a narrowly conceived notion of forests that do not accommodate the holistic notion of forest ecosystem management that is emerging in some of the most innovative cases that we selected for the study.
For this reason, the local innovations run the
risk of increased policy restrictions at any time, given
the fluid political contexts of the country."
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