Federation of community forest user groups in Nepal: An innovation in democratic forest governance

Despite the proliferation of participatory governance discourse and devolutionary policy innovations in recent years, the forest sector continues to face recurrent democratisation challenges, especially in relation to how concerned groups of citizens can effectively participate, influence, and innovate at different scales of governance and decision making. While community forestry-related innovations in different parts of the world have provided significant opportunities to local people to exercise control over forest management and benefit sharing, there are still limited innovations as regards how local forest-dependent citizens can effectively exercise their voice in local to national policy development processes. This is especially critical in view of the top-down and technocratic approaches to forest policy making that prevail in many countries. As a result, participatory and decentralised policies of forest governance have actually been an extension of centralised approaches, with limited freedom and opportunity being made available to local communities over forest management and benefit sharing.