Papers of recently concluded conference on Environmental Governance and Democracy are available online. One of the invited papers includes an article on "Citizen Participation in Forest Governance: Insights from Community Forestry in Nepal".

Ojha, H. R., Subedi, B. P., Dhungana, H. and Paudel, D. 2008. Citizen Participation in Forest Governance: Insights from Community Forestry in Nepal. Paper presented at Conference on Environmental Governance and Democracy (Institutions, public participation and environmental sustainability: Bridging research and capacity development), May 10-11, 2008, Yale University, New Haven

Abstract: While decentralised approaches to forest governance are becoming increasingly common in the developing world, there are still limited cases in which local forest dependent citizens have successfully participated in forest governance policies and practices. Nepal’s Community Forestry Program (CFP) is considered one of the few innovations in this regard. CFP is not just a government program offering some services to people; it is owned and actively sustained by citizens – who are organized as Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs). Currently, 16 thousands CFUGs (covering one third of 26 million people) directly participate in the governance of forests throughout the country. As such, Nepal’s CFP is probably the largest sectoral domain of governance in terms of the number of citizens directly engaged, surpassing even the largest political party in Nepal. CFP is flourishing in the country, nurturing democracy at the grassroots, despite armed conflicts and political upheavals. Opening up of spaces for participation in forest governance demonstrates that it has generated both procedural and substantive gains. Procedural gains include democratic deliberation in decision making procedures and institution building. Substantive gains include creation of livelihood opportunities and ecological conservation.

Studies correlate a number of conditions and factors to CFP success – discursive projection of crisis of Himalayan degradation and consequent international assistance; emergence of multiparty political system in 1990 and consequent expansion of civil society spaces; willingness of elected government to legally empower local communities to manage forests; forest based livelihoods systems in rural Nepal and incentives to local people to participate in forest management for a range of forest products and livelihoods opportunities; presence of dense social capital and traditional models of collective action around local forest management in Nepal; continued tradition of piloting and reflection among CFP stakeholders including regular five yearly nation-wide workshops since the eighties; increased research and scholarly interests in community forestry; breaking down of traditional relations of power through political movements and emergence of ‘subaltern’ groups taking leadership power at the CFUG levels. 

Nepal’s CFP case has also surfaced a number of “second generation” and “third generation” issues in forest governance, which require further conceptual and empirical explorations. Participation of citizens in governance continue to face techno-bureaucratic challenges, as forest officials often tend to handle the issues of governance through technical scientific and bureaucratic strategies. Even when right to manage forests has been transferred to local communities, forest officials exercise extra legal and significant degree of influence through technical knowledge. This is reinforced by feudalistic approach of the political parties which avoid democratic deliberation with citizens. As a result, devolution policies often fail to empower the poor and excluded citizen groups to participate effectively in forest governance. While participation of elite members of civil society has improved governance when compared with the state management of forest, the continuing challenge is to understand how marginalized members of civil society can equally participate in the process.

The paper concludes that possibility for further deepening democracy in forest sector lies in the quality of deliberative interactions (including mechanisms for negotiating power and knowledge) among marginalized citizen groups, political elites, development organizations, and state forest officials.  Ongoing restructuring of state can provide opportunity to redefine political structures and institutions in a way that augments citizen voice in governance, but the on-going discourses and processes of state restructuring are themselves shaped and pre-structured through feudal and techno-bureaucratic mindsets.  The question remains as to when and how deliberative processes expand beyond the repressive boundaries of techno-bureaucratic and feudalistic institutions in forest governance in Nepal.

Full paper is available for download at conference website.