National Workshop

On

Creating Common Agenda for Terai Forestry: Lessons Learned from Community and Collaborative Management of Forests

February 20-21, 2006

Kathmandu

Introduction

The management of the Terai forests has been a crucial agenda since their nationalization in 1956. Several vacillating policies immerged in the forestry sector, but the focus on the Terai has gained its impetus since 1990s, when the government started approving Operational Forest Management Plans (OFMP) for the Terai and Inner Terai districts. The OFMPs delineated the district forests into production, protection, and potential community and leasehold forests as the working circles. However, all of the OFMPs are suspended due to several reasons, the most obvious being the lack of sufficient consultations with the principal stakeholders during their preparation. Some of the statistics in the plans with their corresponding facts in the fields were also reported to be mismatched. Consequently, another approach emerged with the Forestry Sector Policy of 2000. It asserted that the contiguous large blocks of Terai forests would be managed under collaborative forest management (CFM) mode, while the barren and isolated forest lands would be handed over as community forests (CF).

Community forestry and the collaborative management of forests are the two major community-based forest management modes in the Terai. The CF has its silver jubilee experiences; while the CFM is still in inception phase. The CF has been proved to be an unparallel mode for the hills, while it is not free of criticism in the Terai context, particularly in users' inclusion and equity issues. The CFM, on the other hand, claims to be an alternative to resolve the inclusion and equity issues in Terai forestry. The recent policy documents of the Government have also emphasized that various modes of forest management exist and CF practiced in the hills can not be emulated in the large contiguous blocks of the Terai. Despite the policy shift, there is a strong counter-contention that CF is sufficient to address users' inclusion and equity issues in the Terai if appropriate deliberative governance is provided. The pro-CF side also claims that the institutional mechanism of CF has been acknowledged as a success and therefore it can be replicated across the country regardless of demographic structures and ecological belts. The argument and counter-argument have transformed from conceptual debate to field-level conflicts. Consequently, neither the collaborative nor the community forestry has gained its momentum in the Terai since the new policy and programs were initiated.

Nonetheless, the issues pertaining to the Terai forests need to be resolved to achieve national agenda such as poverty reduction, employment generation, biodiversity conservation and equitable distribution of resources from forestry sector. The hypothesis from the two streams of stakeholders that the collaborative mode or the community mode was appropriate needs to be tested with the lessons learned hitherto from the practices, debates, studies; existing scenarios; and prospects of both the modes. It can be assumed that various views have sprouted from different stakeholders as a result of social learning process. But these views have been sporadic and it has been important to provide a common forum to bring these views into a concrete finding. Therefore, a workshop as a common and neutral platform would be significant to develop a common agenda for the Terai forest management on the backdrop of lessons from community forestry and the prospects of collaborative mode. To address the need a national workshop on Creating Common Agenda for Terai Forestry: Lessons Learned from Community and Collaborative Management of Forests has been proposed.

Aim and objectives of the workshop

The aim of the workshop is to provide a common forum for the representative principal stakeholders of Terai forests to discuss the lessons learned from both the community and collaborative forestry practices and create a consensus. The specific objectives are:

• Create a neutral forum where lessons from and prospects of both the community and collaborative management in the Terai are shared.
• Explore and understand the issues and opportunities of Community Forestry and Collaborative Forest Management in the Terai
• Provide an opportunity for diverse stakeholders with different opinions to come closer in exploring win-win strategy of forest management in the Terai. 

Expected outputs

In connection with the aim and objectives, some substantial outputs have been expected from the workshop as follows:

• Awareness raised on the current issues of forest management in the Terai.
• The strengths of Community Forestry and Collaborative Forest Management in addressing forestry issues in the Terai evaluated.
• A shared understanding developed among different stakeholders to transform their commitments for managing Terai forests on the basis of the lessons learnt.
• A basis for reviewing the existing policies, programs and activities in CFM and CF in the Terai identified

Participants of workshop

The workshop will host the participants from different stream of stakeholders of Terai forestry, such as the community forestry user groups; collaborative forestry user groups; government institutions; civil societies; educational and research institutions, international organizations, and donor communities in forestry sector.

Organizing institution

The workshop is managed and organized by a multi-stakeholder National Steering Team with the coordination of Nepal Foresters' Association (NFA). The team is composed of the representatives from NFA, Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation, the Department of Forests; Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal (FECOFUN); Nepalese Federation of Forest Resources User Groups (NEFUG); Himalayan Grassroots Women's Natural Resources Management Association Nepal (HIMAWANTI) National; Livelihood and Forestry Program (LFP); Biodiversity Sector Program for Siwaliks and Terai (BISEP-ST) and Forest Action. NFA is the focal point of the Steering Team and the workshop.

Thematic areas of papers and coordination

Altogether seven thematic areas have been identified for the potential papers to be presented at the workshop. The number of papers has been tentatively fixed to be at least seven, one from the thematic area each. The interested authors are requested to contact the coordinator of the theme, on which they would like to write. The authors are required to submit a summary or abstract not exceeding 300 words with the title of the paper no later than December 31, 2005. If the abstract is approved, the authors will provide the paper with no more than 7,000 words including the abstract by January 31, 2006.