Farmers' responsibilization in payment for environmental services: Lessons from community forestry in Nepal

Dualistic development and economic benefits: Experience from Community Forestry in Nepal

Almost one third of the forest areas (1.71 million hectares) throughout Nepal has been handed over to the local communities as community forests for ensuring the communities primarily to fulfill their basic needs of forestry products, besides their active participation on conserving biodiversity, and instigating social development at local level. More than 18,000 Community Forest User Groups (C...

Improving the Effectiveness of Collective Action: Sharing Experiences from Community Forestry in Nepal

The CGIAR Systemwide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi) is an initiative of the 15 centers that belong to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. The initiative promotes comparative research on the role played by property rights and collective action institutions in shaping the efficiency, sustainability, and equity of natural resource systems. CAPRi...

A Forest Community or Community Forestry? Beliefs, meanings and nature in north-western Nepal

Fairly efficient, efficiently fair: Lessons from designing and testing payment schemes for ecosystem services in Asia

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is commonly defined as a market-based environmental policy instrument to efficiently achieve ecosystem services provision. However, an increasing body of literature shows that this prescriptive conceptualization of PES cannot be easily generalized and implemented in practice, and that the commodification of ecosystem services (ES) is problematic and may lead...

Seeing farmers for the trees: Community forestry and the arborealisation of agriculture in northern Thailand

The campaign for community forestry in upland areas of northern Thailand reflects an ‘arborealised’ perspective on upland agriculture. Arborealisation – which I define as the process whereby upland livelihoods are recast as forest livelihoods – is evident in the main elements of NGO and academic advocacy for the resource rights of upland peoples. As a result of this arborealised perspective, se...