Stakeholder opinions on scientific forest management policy implementation in Nepal

Abstract

Despite its widespread recognition as a successful model of participatory forest management, the community forestry program in Nepal is often criticized for its protection-oriented emphasis. Recognizing the need for more active timber management, the government of Nepal recently adopted a scientific forest management (SFM) policy in the lowland tropical region. In this study, strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat analytical hierarchical process criteria were employed to understand stakeholder perceptions concerning SFM implementation in Nepal. The overall perception was prioritized in the order of strengths (35%), threats (28%), opportunities (22%), and weaknesses (16%). The study results suggest that there is agreement among stakeholders regarding the need for active management of forests in the tropical lowland region. However, the perceptions of academic researchers and non-government organization professionals differed from those of the other stakeholders in that those two groups were more concerned about potential corruption and uncertainties surrounding policy and legal issues. The findings suggest that the long-term success of SFM may depend on the ability of the government to develop a mechanism that is transparent and capable of ensuring equitable benefit sharing among stakeholders. While the stakeholder perception analysis performed in this study was focused on SFM implementation in Nepal, the results could have implications for other countries that practice the participatory model of forest governance as well.

Scientific Forest Management Practice in Nepal: Critical Reflections from Stakeholders’ Perspectives

“…In particular, implementation of SciFM in community forests has been widely criticized for the dominance of technical forestry officials and for limiting the role of forest user groups (FUGs) in forest management planning and implementation procedures [27][28][29][30]. Likewise, benefit-sharing among stakeholders and transparency of the processes are equally concerning [15,31]. Since one-third of the country's forest area is being managed under community-based forest management regimes [18], any forest management interventions that include these regimes need to satisfy the stakeholders involved.…”

Timber Distribution Dynamics in Scientifically Managed Community Forests: Learning from Nepal

“…Along the same lines, Khanal and Adhikari [24] find that SciFM intervention has increased the harvesting of forest products from community forests. Similarly, the arguments by many scholars like Bampton and Cammaert [57] and Joshi et al [31] also support that SciFM implementation is timber-focused. Equally, Basnyat et al [23] describe Nepal's SciFM as timber-centric; users obtain a considerable amount of timber, and they invest time to harvest timber from the forest.…”

“…Overall, we found that SciFM intervention in community forest has some positive implications, although several limitations have been demonstrated by recent studies; it is accused of having decreased user power and user participation and posing threats of recentralization [31,39,65]. SciFM has focused on timber harvesting and employed technical aspects that could be a burden to forest users [27,38].…”

“…Both elite capture and bureaucratic control govern this process. Thus, this system could ultimately decrease user participation in decision-making and forest management activities [31,39,58].…”

Importance of Community Forestry Funds for Rural Development in Nepal

“…After formulating the Scientific Forest Management Guideline 2014, the scientific forestry has taken momentum in the collaborative forest and in mid-hills community forest area including Kaski district [30]. This demands active forest management and is financially attractive [31]. However, the income from the wood is grounded on the annual allowable cut that is prescribed on forest operational plan of CFUGs.…”