Good Governance Assessment in Nepal's Community Forestry

Abstract

Forest governance has received considerable attention in recent years because good governance in community forestry is deemed to be one way of harnessing its potentiality to contribute to poverty reduction. This study aims to examine forest governance by assessing whether the executive committees of Nepal's Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) are inclusive in terms of gender, caste, and wealth class. The study relies on primary data from 84 CFUGs in five different districts of Nepal, where structured questionnaires were used for collecting information. The findings suggest that the executive committees are more or less inclusive of gender and wealth class, and the project-supported CFUGs tend to have more executive members that are either female, or poor. Inclusive committees in a CFUG may not reflect good governance, as there is a chance that marginalized groups will be exploited in the name of inclusion. Therefore, there is a need to build capacity of marginalized groups before asking them to represent in the executive committees of CFUGs.