Restoring Forests and Improving Livelihoods in Nepal: Four Decades of Community Forestry

This book presents a comprehensive review of new research and practice-based insights from Nepal’s four decades of community forestry development, delving into when and how community-based management can lead to forest landscape restoration and equitable livelihoods. With over four decades of formal program history, Nepal’s community forestry is a rare case from the Global South showcasing the trajectories and outcomes of a community-based environmental management initiative. It offers historically proven lessons of what it takes to restore degraded forests in a way that empowers local communities to make decisions. The book showcases research and experiential insights of those who became part of Nepal’s community forestry movement from the early years to the current stage. Tracing stories of change from the era of “Himalayan degradation” in the 1970s to the globally hailed success of community forestry in the 2000s, the book demonstrates how the policy, political economy, and changing community dynamics have shaped the everyday practice of community forestry and its contribution to livelihoods and forest restoration. It reveals how small-scale work in the early years evolved into a complex system of community forestry, exposing the challenges associated with social exclusion, resource management, and policy environment. As such, it makes an important contribution to the global knowledge on community driven forest landscape restoration in the Global South where forest ecosystems are inseparable from the everyday life and livelihoods of local communities. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working on forest restoration and conservation, community development, environmental policy and planning, and sustainable development more widely.