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 (CFUGs) have been managing forests throughout the country and implementing different programmes related to forest conservation and livelihoods improvement. With wide spread community forestry, there is dilemma regarding further development of community forestry: Should the future course be “traditional sector enrichment” or “modern sector enlargement”? With this backdrop, the authors resort to give introduction of this paper to our readers.