Community Forestry in Transition: Sixty Years of Experience in the Indian Central Himalayas

Abstract

"Many developing nations around the world have been promoting decentralization of natural resource management with the hope that by providing secure tenure to resource use, people dependent on the natural resources for livelihood will seek to conserve them. This study presents experiences in commons management from Kumaun in northern India, where formal local institutions of community forestry (<i>van panchayats</i>) were established in the 1940s. The paper provides a closer look into transitions in community forestry and other informal institutions of commons management as these are influenced by changing socio-economic contexts on the one hand, and changing state policies on the other. The study suggests that while local institutions, formal and informal, have had strong interest in conservation of natural resources and have been very successful in managing commonly held resources (particularly village forests) sustainably, and forest commons continue to be managed more effectively than private and government forests, the past two decades of socio-economic transitions taking place in this region is resulting in a rapid decline of local institutions of commons management and effectiveness of these institutions. Decentralization policies could benefit from greater attention to these socio-economic transformations and implications for local institutions and natural resource sustainability."