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In this guidebook, suggestions are made for how a team of facilitators and a community forest user group (CFUG) can catalyse and maintain an approach to governance and management that draws on and strengthens the CFUG?s own adaptive and collaborative capacities
. This approach fits within the Community Forestry framework and supports CFUGs in addressing two fundamental challenges: equity and the generation of livelihood benefits. Experience shows that active and thoughtful facilitation of this approach can help CFUGs make their governance more inclusive, address tensions within the group, create more active groups with greater shared ownership of the community forest, and spark more livelihood generation activities, including for the poor. The transition to such an approach is not an easy or straight path: it involves changing relations and perspectives. Groups and their facilitators may use the suggestions in this book to help guide them as they travel on their journey, but the choices and steps are ultimately their own. Similarly, the specific outcomes of the change will be unique in each context. But this is also a strength: just as every CFUG is unique and everchanging, so its aspirations and its optimal strategies of governance and management will also be unique and ever-changing
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This paper examines the performance of an adaptive collaborative management approach (ACM) to increasing poor people's access to, rights and benefits from a community-based nonwood forest product (NWFP) network enterprise in the Eastern Hills of Nepal
. This network has rights over some 2,000 hectares of community forests and more than 1,346 member households. It had existed for two-and-a-half years prior to the 2004 start of the CIFOR-led Participatory Action Research Project on which this paper is based, but was plagued by perceptions of elite and male domination and there were conflicts between members in benefit sharing and problems of forest degradation. As such, the research project, the network, and local NGOs began a collaborative “renewal” of the network focused on the arrangement of collective action to support pro-poor forestry through applying an ACM approach. This approach included shifts in governance and management planning, especially regarding representation, conflict management, and risk and uncertainty analysis of the network enterprise. The major outcomes can be seen as a convergence of changes in community forest management and conflict mitigation, improved livelihood benefits from NWFP resources for the poorest families, and other forms of capital.
One of the most notable changes is that network members shifted from working in relative isolation to building alliances and greater interdependence, a change that helped mitigate conflicts between them regarding benefit sharing. Interestingly, the developing relationships between different stakeholders appear also to have contributed to shifting the attitudes of local elite and men towards equity in access of the poor to decision making and benefit sharing in the NWFP enterprise. Furthermore, significant space has been created for opportunities for poorer households by providing them with access to revolving funds specifically to enable them to become shareholders in the NWFP network. This shareholder status opens the door for multiple opportunities from which they had previously been excluded, including obtaining benefits from share dividend, employment as NWFP collectors, and receiving bonuses from the profits. The other stakeholders such as local traders, CFUGs, village entrepreneurs, and general members also have obtained benefits from the share dividend. Two national traders (Himalayan Bio-Trade (P) Ltd., Laba Nepali Paper Udhog) have agreed to make a contract with the network to buy NWFPs in sufficient quantities and at handsome prices. Besides, because of the arrangement for collective action, the women’s subgroup of this network has been able to increase profit margins from the sale of nettle fiber cloth. This subgroup constitutes largely the very poor and indigenous people
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In Nepal, the number of Forest User Groups (FUGs) and areas of community forest are increasing every year
. If these FUGs and community forests are managed properly, they can provide many direct and indirect benefits to the local communities on a sustainable basis. Forests are an integral part of the farming system and ecosystems of Nepal, therefore the sustainability of the two are inseparable. This case study illustrates the importance of a range of social and economic indicators, in addition to the usual environmental indicators, as a measure of sustainability. The identification, quantification and valuation of the costs and benefits associated with the management of a community forest can help the FUG to monitor the sustainability of their management regime. In the case of the Chuliban community forest, the distribution of these costs and benefits among the different forest users was found to be a particularly critical factor that could lead to the long-term success or failure of the FUG
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