Shiva Khanal in the September issue of LEISA Magazine writes how the Nepal Government plan to scale up the local successes of leasehold forestry failed. 

With leasehold forestry, poor households are allowed to use a plot of degraded forest for a certain amount of time. In Nepal, a project showed that this helped poor households improve their living standards, while at the same time reviving degraded forests.  Implementing leasehold forestry on a larger scale was a logical next step. 

The national government therefore commissioned its expansion in 2002. A National Planning Commission aimed to establish 100 000 hectares of leasehold forestry in the tenth five-year plan (2002-2007). Now, after the plan, this ambition seems to have largely failed. By 2007, the area under leasehold forestry increased by only a few thousand hectares rather than the planned 100 000. The government plan failed for several reasons:

1. Not everybody warmheartedly supported leasehold forestry. Officials involved with wildlife management saw it as a threat. According to them, it meant turning forest into land for agriculture, and therefore they did not like it – even if it boosted biodiversity
2. Some NGOs regarded leasehold forestry as a threat to well-established community forestry. In community forestry, forest is handed over to mixed groups of rich and poor households, based on the community around patches of forest. A review has shown that despite many initiatives aimed at poor households, community forestry benefits rich households, with poor households often ending up being worse off. Leasehold forestry could therefore be a good complementary approach. But many NGOs did not share this view.
3. The new, decentralised district forestry co-ordination committees still needed to develop planning procedures for land use, enabling them to allocate leasehold forestry next to community forest or parks.

Download the full article at LEISA website