Lack Of Investment In Institution Building: A Major Lacuna of JFM

Abstract

"A decade long experience of increasing popularity of JFM among communities located in and around forests has encouraged the government to strengthen the program by setting up Forest Development Agency (FDA) as federation of JFM committees. This step to take JFM to the next logical level is indicative of Government of Indias commitment towards peoples participation in forest management. FDA programme is being promoted to ensure sustainability of forests by establishing linkages between rural development, rural employment, and forest conservation. Present paper is based on a study of three communities undertaken in the year 2002 to understand status of JFM as a decentralised institution, using IFRI methodology. Same three communities were revisited in the year 2007, which had come under the FDA umbrella by then, and same methodology was used to collect institutional data. The paper shows that JFM and FDA programmes concentrate only on investments in resource enhancement through plantations, and neither do the communities formulate and follow self-restrictive rules of forest product use, nor does the Forest Department guide the communities to build robust institutions."