Nepal's Community Forestry: Need of Better Governance

Abstract

Community forestry promotes the management of forests as Common Pool Resources (CPRs) (Ostrom, 1992; Acharya, 2002). A common pool resource refers to a natural or manmade resource system that is sufficiently large as to make it costly to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use (Ostrom, 1990). All CPRs share two attributes: it is costly to exclude individuals from using the goods either through physical barriers or legal instruments, and the benefits consumed by one individual subtract from the benefits available to others (Ostrom and Ostrom, 1977; Ostrom et al., 1994). There are some problems in managing CPRs. The problem of CPR is overuse which is described by Hardin (1968) as Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin uses meaning of commons as open access i.e., everybody's property and everybody's property is nobody's property (Gordon, 1954). Resources managed as common property are not necessarily open access. They are managed by a community or social group with exclusive rights to use resources. The rights to use resources are limited to the group; not to everybody. One feature of common property is a right to use something in common with others (MacPherson, 1978). As property is in common, the property rights are assigned to a community or social group where the rules of appropriation of resources are assumed to safeguard the community or social group. Members of the group agree to limit their individuals claim on resource by subscribing to rules governing the use of resources. Hardin’s notion of the commons was scrutinized under the conceptual differences between resource types and property rights governing their use (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop, 1975). The property rights and governance are closely intertwined and it is one reason that several studies have examined common property institutions to produce different attributes that are conducive for collective action and also for successful governance of resources (Ostrom, 1990; Baland and Platteau, 1996; Hobley and Shah, 1996; Ostrom, 1999; Agrawal, 2001).