Participation in forest and conservation management

Abstract

The World Bank defends that local participation in conservation projects and community forestry programs help to improve forest productivity, alleviate poverty, enhance environmental sustainability, and make governing rules to forest access more enforceable. Effective empowering participatory processes are time consuming as they require consensus building among stakeholders, ensure rules and regulation to motivate inclusiveness, decentralizes finances and administrative tasks and build organizational capacity at the local level. It is explained that project success relays on the ability of the group to share costs and responsibilities, it is understood that by stakeholders it is meant women, indigenous groups, and landless households. Also, it is fundamental to ensure government commitment to broaden participation of all stakeholders, as it will facilitate the introduction of forestry reforms. If necessary special measure should be taken to ensure representation of everyone's needs. In Nepal, the Bank financed projects have endorsed tenure rights to local communities.