This paper "From degradation to restoration: An assessment of the enabling conditions for community forestry in Nepal. B.K. Pokharel, Th. Stadtmüller and J.-L.Pfund, 2005 " provides an analysis of key factors and enabling conditions for community based forest resource management, which led to the emergence and consolidation of local institutions and organizations devoted to promoting community forestry in Nepal. A collective effort to establish good forest governance systems at local level was eventually able to combat forest degradation effectively, to improve forest conditions and forest agriculture interface successfully, leading to effective forest landscape restoration. It is shown that forest degradation in the past was essentially the outcome of non-consultative ways of policy making, inappropriate policies, wrong institutional arrangements and a controlling legislative framework instead of promoting active participation by local stakeholders. Learning from mistakes and continuous joint efforts of a wide range of actors have brought positive changes in the productive capacity of forests, availability of wood and non-wood forest products, improvement of agricultural productivity and supplementary income to local communities.

The paper examines the enabling conditions like interest, skills and capacities by local actors, as well as pluralistic forest governance system of community forestry in Nepal. The latter comprises community based organizations such as Community Forest User Groups (FUGs), user group federation, government, non government and external agencies with a clearly defined role within the corresponding legal framework which has been developed, adapted, refined and reformulated and adapted over the years.

A comparative overview of the past and present, together with the changing trend in terms of policy, process, practices, actors and outcomes is provided. On this basis lessons from 25 years of com-munity forestry in Nepal are drawn. It is concluded that the trend of forest degradation can be re-versed through the involvement of local communities, appropriate policy and legal frameworks with legitimate decentralized institutional arrangements developed over time through inclusive consulta-tive processes and based on the learning from successes and failures of the past.

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