© Society for Human Ecology Research in Human Ecology

This paper explores locally agreed upon indicators to determine the success of Nepal’s community forestry pro-gram. A workshop for community forest user groups (CFUGs) representatives and local forestry professionals was organized to develop the indicators. An interview sched-ule was developed to solicit CFUG members ’ views on the identified indicators. A stratified random sample of CFUG members was taken, and 487 members were randomly select-ed for personal interviews. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data. Findings show that access to fuel wood, fod-der and timber; amount of community funds; incidence of forest fire; use of compost; women’s participation in forestry meetings; forest status; and quality of drinking water were the most often agreed-upon indicators to determine the suc-cess of the community forestry program. There tends to be congruency between the local people’s perspectives and the views of scientific communities on many indicators of the suc-cess of the community forestry program