-Trine Schnell Nielsen and Kristian Bang Larsen

Community Forestry is big in Nepal. You can find it in the Hills and in Terai and it is heavily supported by foreign donors’ money. But what is CF and why is it so popular both with foreign donors, His Majesty’s Government of Nepal (HMG) and the Nepalese farmers?

CF is handing over the management of forests to the local communities. The local communities form Forest User Groups (FUG) consisting of those from the local community who already use the forest. A FUG has the right to use and the responsibility to protect their forest.

CF in Nepal had a slow start with HMG after the World Bank in 1978 made the apocalyptic predicament that Nepal would find itself without forests by the year 2000, if the assumed degradation of the Himalayas and the Terai continued. In this predicament the farmers were seen as a harmful factor to the environment, as they were cutting down the forest to give way to farmland and thereby causing erosion and sediment wash outs into the rivers. So how can it preserve or even improve the forest by letting these destructive farmers manage it?

It is only possible because the development business and HMG has started to perceive local farmers as the most natural preservers of the environment, instead of as the enemies of the environment as they were perceived earlier. The preserving farmers are of course the same people as the former destructive farmers, but their position has been redefined and their actions too.

It is the classical pattern in Western ways of perceiving people of other regions than the Western sphere. First other people were perceived as a part of nature, then they were perceived as different from the nature and destructive to it. Today they are perceived as dependent on nature and, therefore, it is assumed that they will protect it and that they have the indigenous knowledge necessary to do so. This perception, the concept of participation and the acknowledgment of indigenous knowledge are in fashion in the development business right now and that makes CF a popular political option in natural resources management today.

CF is popular with both International donors, HMG and the farmers as it accommodates every one’s agendas. All agree on the management system, but the motives and interests are not at all the same.

Another issue is that forests with high biological diversity potentially are billions of dollars worth if their genetic materials are researched and utilised as medicines, new species of seeds or what ever can be imagined. But who has the resources to conduct the research and who will the research benefit? It is not likely to be Nepal, but rather populations and companies of those countries where the foreign donors originate from.

CF is interesting to HMG as the FUGs can manage the forests with a higher economical output than any governmental institution can. The government does not have to spend a lot of money on an ineffective guard system to prevent the farmers from exploiting the forest, as the farmers now are their own guards. HMG gets a percentage of the CF earnings and can sit back and see the FUGs invest a lot of work building up a dense forest resource that HMG still owns.

The farmers – those, whose lives are most affected by CF – primarily have a potential Brundtland-inspired interest to preserve the forest for their future generations. The higher output from forest products from the well-managed CF can not even outweigh the loses of cattle taken by wild animals, whose amount raises simultaneously with the spreading of the forest, nor can it match up with the high input of labour invested in the managing of the forest, not to mention that agricultural land is occasionally included into the forest. Economically CF is not a super good deal for the farmers, especially because they do not own the land that they are investing their work in; they only have user-rights.

Mentally their gain might be higher as FUGs speak of higher self-esteem and the feeling of doing something, which makes a difference. The farmer from Dhading is proud and enthusiastic – as he stands there pointing to the hill slopes, but what happens if the international donors or HMG change their minds again. What will happen if they start perceiving the farmers in new positions in relation to the environment? Then the missing ownership of the forest can turn out to be a serious problem to the FUGs.

But before the community forest is handed over to the FUGs, the FUGs have to learn how to think about the forest in a new way. Even if a theoretical acceptance of indigenous knowledge exists, then in practise the oral knowledge of the communities is not acknowledged. So the weird situation arises; after acknowledging that local knowledge is superior to foreign knowledge in relation to management of a local forest, programmes are set up and donor-financed experts start to educate the local farmers - Subject: forest management and how to work together as a community.

The FUGs are trained by government forest rangers who have received donor financed training for example within the NARMSAP-programme. NARMSAP is a joint venture of HMG and DANIDA and includes five regional training centres for forest personnel. FUGs can come to the centres to receive forest management training and forest rangers go to the villages to conduct seminars and monitor the FUGs.

On this process Nanda R. Shrestha, author of a book entitled “In the name of development”, states that it is nothing new. It is the same old way of the functioning of development business; “first demonise what is local, second destroy it, and finally redesign it and feed it back to the local as if it is a magic wand.” (Personal comment from N.R. Shrestha.)

By now the farmer from Dhading has been convinced that he and his village lack knowledge of forest management, and on being a community, need to be educated in that respect. They take all the training they can get and believe that “the educated people tell us that the income from the community forest will help us in the future,” the farmer trustingly tells us when we are walking back towards the village by the dusty road.

The effectiveness and success of CF depends on the disciplining or training of the involved FUG members into having a specific understanding of the forest and themselves. Because of CF the FUG members have redefined their relationship to the forest, their own identity, and their perception on how a community should work and on their own future prospects.

All in all the farmers are happy about CF as it gives them a sense of pride and as the forest has always been essential to them because of the firewood, the animal fodder and all the other forest products they use in their daily life. It is not strange to them to work with the forest.

Interestingly enough CF is a feel-good story because of a strange coincidence where the agendas of foreign donors, HMG and the local farmers coincide. If all these agendas had not coincided then the farmer from Dhading would not have had that same CF-enthusiasm in his eyes.

(Trine Schnell Nielsen and Kristian Bang Larsen are graduate students of communication of the Roskilde University Centre, Denmark. They are at present in Nepal shooting a documentary on the influence of international development aid on Nepal.)