For Environment, Democracy and Livelihoods
The Deliberative Scientist – Democratizing Scientific Practice in Forest Management.
The forest act 1993 allows local communities to organize as Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) to manage accessible patches of forest areas, and envisions a facilitative role for the forest officials of the government forest department. This signifies a gradual but significant shifts in the roles and relationships between foresters and villagers with regard to the management of forests, away from the earlier practice of centralized management of forests by forest bureaucrats, whose main role was to guard forest areas against local people. By 2005, there are about fifteen thousand CFUGs nationally, managing over a million hectares of forest areas, bringing about one third of the country’s population under CFUG system. This participatory model of forest governance is now much heralded for its reported success on generating local livelihood benefits as well as reversing earlier trends of forest degradation. But amidst this success, closer analyses have started to raise concerns on consistency of the impact on both livelihoods and ecological sustainability. Central to these concerns is the ways through which forest bureaucrats and local forest users negotiate knowledge and political power pertaining to the management of forest areas…..
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