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Can Bureaucratic Control Improve Community Forestry Governance?

The Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation (MoFSC) of Nepal has recently passed a proposal and drafted an amendment bill to revise the Forest Act 1993. This Act provided the legal foundation for community forestry programme in Nepal during the past two decades. However, the MoFSC has justified its recent move for legal change by citing anecdotal cases of irregularities and illegal felling in some parts of Terai and Churia region. But the Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal (FECOFUN) and other civil society organizations have strongly opposed this move. As a result, positions on the move have polarized, and sparked off resistance and opposition at local to national levels. In this context, this paper examines the proposal in terms of the process and contents, and assesses how it impacts the community forestry programme and whether the proposed change would bring about expected outcomes. Doing this we hope to enrich the deliberation on this issue.We suggest that, in terms of the process, MoFSC has undermined the multi-stakeholder and deliberative process, which was being progressively adopted over the past few years in forestry sector policy making. Some key assumptions behind this proposal have therefore become flawed. We also find that the proposed changes stipulated in the proposal are likely to aggravate the problems in community forest user groups — particularly corruption, illegal felling, and inequity — that MoFSC commits to resolve. We suggest that multi-stakeholder based and deliberative process can help identify the problems and remove flaws of this proposal. This process needs to be informed by a robust and independent study of the problems in order to be able to determine workable solutions.