Technical forest management plans have become a precondition for transferring authority to local institutions in processes of participatory forest management. The plans are intended to safeguard environmental values and are justified by their relevance in daily forest management. To serve these functions, the plans must be informed by accurate information about the forest and be actively used by local communities. Based on studies in Nepal, this paper seeks to further our understanding of the role of so-called scientific planning in community-level management through time series analyses of remote sensing images, detailed forest inventories and interviews with community forest managers and public forest authorities. Results indicate that technical forest management plans have been elaborated haphazardly and that local communities base their management on other sources of knowledge. Further, community-level managers appear well-informed about forest condition and their practices contribute to sustainable forest development. We suggest the need to further scrutinize the regime of scientific management planning as its practical relevance appears questionable.