Indigenous Knowledge and Community Centric Forest Management in Nepal

The natural resource conservation sense of tribal, ethnic and indigenous communities has emerged as an important component in the academic an activist discourse related to human ecology. Influenced by the concept of decentralised development and governance that gained ascendancy during the 1990s, the intrinsic potential of forest dependent communities to manage natural resources attracted the attention of public policies of several countries in South Asia. This chapter, focusing on historical and contemporary dimensions of participatory natural and forest management in Nepal, proposes that the domain of community emerged as an important component of public policy for implementation of decentralised forest management. It has been postulated in this chapter that the inherent potential of communities for management of forests was incorporated into community centric forest management to increase of forest cover and improvement in livelihood conditions of local communities which deepened upon forests for survival.