Forest Policy and Environment Programme: Grey Literature

Joint forest management (JFM), community forestry, collaborative management are just a few of the terms that have come into use over the last 15 to 20 years to describe a new set of relationships between the state (usually through forest departments) and people living in and close to forests and woodlands. In this overview, the origins of these forms of forestry are discussed and the implications in terms of the benefits accruing to people, the institutional responses and the ecological changes. This overview focuses on the changes in India and Nepal between the 1980s and 1990s where much of the earliest experience was gained and which was influential in many other countries in other continents. Social forestry in India, and the early forms of panchayat based plantation forestry in Nepal, were the precursors to both joint forest management and community forestry. They shared a common set of features as described in Table 1 but their later form is significantly different in two key aspects: 1) sharing of benefits- in the hills of Nepal, community forestry user groups were in control of 100 % of the usufructs from the forests, whereas in India there is a varying percentage sharing of benefits between forest departments and forest users depending on the quality of the forest; and 2) the relationship between fores