Above, a team sets up a camera trap. Our partner, the Nature Conservation and Study Centre (NCSC), is working with the Gopaleshwar Community Forest members to learn about leopards and other wildlife in their community forest area.
Reforestation and Resilience in Nepal
The positive impacts of community forests in Nepal are a global model for community-based conservation. More than 22,000 community forests in Nepal protect more than one-third of the country’s forests, directly benefiting more than half of households in Nepal. Community forestry in Nepal has doubled the amount of forest from 26% of land area in 1992 to 45% in 2016 and reduced poverty.
As communities have gained experience managing and governing their forests, they have also incubated democratic principles. Community forestry entails communities forming user groups (CFUGs) and committees, creating and enforcing rules about the extraction and use of natural resources, and distributing benefits to members of the community. These processes require communities to practice principles of good governance: participation, inclusion, transparency, and accountability.
A group of young conservationists play a community conservation board game during one of our workshops. The game was developed by Dan Jergens, an Ambassador-At- Large. This special edition game is based on our conservation work in Nepal.
Because of these experiences with governance, community forestry groups have not only protected forests, they have also made important contributions to Nepal during moments of national crisis. CFUGs played important roles during Nepal’s civil conflict from 1996 to 2006, the 2015 earthquake, and the current Covid pandemic.
The Impactful Role of CFUGs
CFUGs continued to function during the civil conflict even when government institutions were not functioning. When there were no local elections in 2002, CFUGs continued to make decisions on resource allocation within the community, including for the poor and excluded, and provided services that otherwise would not have existed. They were able to do this because they had financial resources, decision-making structures, and access to natural resources that generated the funds.
Workshop participants learning about the many factors involved in community forest governance.
During the earthquakes in 2015, CFUGs quickly and effectively responded because they already had the social capital of trust, connections, and the network to reach millions of people in rural areas. They were able to mobilize their members as volunteers, contribute materials for reconstruction, and identify community needs and distribute relief materials.
During the COVID pandemic, CFUGs have contributed cash support to the local governments’ relief funds to support poor and vulnerable people and have volunteered their offices and community halls as quarantine facilities, while members are acting as first responders and helping with local health care.
Students share ideas during a workshop.
Finally, the experiences individuals have had participating in community forestry is helping them participate in Nepal’s democracy. In 2017, 1,967 CFUG members won in local elections, including 16 mayors and 15 rural municipality chairpersons. Of the 14,000 women elected, 632 were members of CFUGs.
The Adaptability of Community Forestry
Community forestry in Nepal over the past five decades has been tasked with achieving many objectives and it has changed and evolved to incorporate a multitude of issues. In the 1980s, the goal of community forestry was to avert an environmental disaster in Nepal by protecting and regenerating forests. In the 1990s, when community forestry expanded rapidly, community forest groups addressed livelihood issues, elite capture, and social inclusion. In the 2000s, community forestry incorporated climate change, payments for ecosystem services, and sustainable forest management.
Workshop participants who successfully completed their training in September 2024. They are now ready to take community conservation practices back to their own communities.
Throughout these shifts, lessons in good governance are at the core. These lessons are simple, powerful, and often very specific. For example, in Tanahun District, the officers of a CFUG described to me how they had learned the importance of having at least two signatures on checks. In Dang District, a group enthusiastically described learning how to use a participatory governance tool to identify their group’s strengths and weaknesses. Near Banke National Park, people told me that due to the buffer zone policies that were recently introduced when the park was created, they had experienced the benefits of prioritizing needs of the poor and marginalized over timber income for the communities.
Community forestry in Nepal has expanded the natural resource base, protected biodiversity, and improved ecosystem services. It has also expanded democratic principles and increased community resilience to climate change, health crises, and natural disasters. It is a model for the world, highlighting how community conservation can contribute in multiple ways to healthy and resilient communities and countries.
Teri D. Allendorf, PhD, is the Executive Director of Community Conservation and a conservation biologist affiliated with the Dept of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the US. She has worked on issues of communities and biodiversity conservation in Nepal and globally for three decades.