Re-centralisation through fake Scientificness: The case of community forestry in Nepal

Highlights

• Forest bureaucrats continuously develop new mechanisms to re-centralise decentralised forest resources.

• Colonial-style resource governance has circumvented the political autonomy of forest user groups.

• Scientific forestry has shifted financial resources away from forest user groups towards the forest bureaucracy.

• Current scientific narratives should be reconsidered in community forestry.

Abstract

This paper explains how powerful actors use scientific forestry narratives to regain power over decentralised forest resources. Through elements of trust, incentives, coercion, and avoidance forest bureaucrats convince forest user groups of the need to implement so-called scientific management and planning principles to obtain predictable harvests. In reality, however, these principles replicate colonial-style Indian forest management and expand the involvement of forest bureaucrats in all aspects of community forestry to re-gain resource control and establish rent-seeking opportunities for forest bureaucrats. In this process, forest user groups lose authority over and income from their forests. We define this as “technical-sounding re-centralisation” since the forest bureaucracy has re-captured decision-making power over forest resources and associated revenue through narratives of scientific forestry. We argue that today's colonial-style re-centralised governance of community forests must give way to forest management principles, which devolve decision-making powers to local communities while ensuring conservation through utilisation, and reasonable taxation.

Introduction

In Nepal, state failure to conserve and manage forest resources lead to the emergence of community forestry in the late seventies (Acharya, 2002; Ojha, 2014). Community Forestry involves a time-unlimited transfer of forest management authority to forest user groups for protection, management, harvesting, and sale of forest products that forest user groups hold full ownership to while the State maintains formal ownership to the land (GoN, 1995; GoN, 1993). In the early 1990s, when community forestry in Nepal focused mostly on forest protection and subsistence use, the technical requirements to community forest management plans were modest. However, concurrently with forest user groups' increasing supply of timber to the commercial market, which was previously dominated by the parastatal Timber Corporation Nepal, the promotion of scientific forestry as a necessary means to prevent overharvesting by forest user groups has gained political traction, especially after the Forest Policy was revised in the year 2000. In 2014, the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation (now Ministry of Forests and Environment) introduced a silviculture-based management system for community forests, popularly known as “Scientific forest management” (SciFM), which emphasises the use of technical/scientific knowledge in forest management planning and harvesting decisions with the active involvement of forest technicians (MFSC, 2014). The legacy of scientific forestry is expanding even in the community forests of Nepal (Basnyat et al., 2018a). At present, the Ministry is promoting SciFM in more than 200 community forests across one-third of all districts in Nepal (Paudel et al., 2017; DoF, 2016).

Scientific forestry is rooted in the perception that the application of scientifically proven methods to manipulate forest environments is the best way to ensure efficient and sustainable production of commercial timber (e.g. Lanz, 2000). The basic theory of scientific forestry is appealingly simple; Over the long-term, the harvest and mortality of desired species must not exceed their re-growth. To calculate the economically optimal annual cut, one needs knowledge about the annual growth, which differs between species and varies within the lifespan of an individual species. Further, one must take into consideration the present and desired composition of growing species, including their age classes. Assessing a forests' growing stock (static inventory) requires recording and measurement of growing trees within a sufficiently large number of temporary sample plots to allow for statistically sound estimates of growing volumes within species and age (or size) classes. If species and age or size-specific knowledge about growth rates exist, one can use the static inventory to calculate the estimated annual growth within species and size-classes (dynamic inventory). The generation of such scientific forest management data is, however, expensive. So, the costs of performing a statistically sound calculation of annual desired cuts will often outweigh the economic benefits in small and difficult to access forests or in forests dominated by young or invaluable tree species.

However, when biophysically scientific concepts of forest governance become bureaucratic requirements to get management plans of decentralised forests officially approved, such requirements tend to ignore economic rationalities, c.f. above, and they often involve a series of superfluous and burdensome bureaucratic measurements that invite re-centralisation by the forest bureaucracy and elite capture at community-level (e.g. Ribot, 2002; Nightingale, 2005; Rutt et al., 2015). Baral and Vacik (2018) question the role of the management plan in community forests since schematic instructions by the forest bureaucracy entirely guide harvesting decisions. Taking the case of community forest management plan revisions, Basnyat et al. (2018b) show that forest bureaucrats used such plan revisions as legal-sounding arguments to re-establish control over community forest resources and associated financial benefits. Similarly, Baral et al. (2018) conclude that forest inventory requirements to get management plans approved strengthens the bureaucratic involvement in community forestry, which re-centralises actual forest authority. In Indonesia, the central government is reclaiming its authority over forest management after an era of formal decentralisation through the “forest management unit” (Sahide et al., 2016). Gauld (2000), observed that the policy discourse of community-based forest policy in the Philippines was shaped by efforts to maintain centralised control over forest management and a political economy orientated towards commercial timber production using the principles of ‘scientific’ management. These examples form part of a vast array of techniques that central government agencies apply to minimise the actual transfer of powers to lower levels of governance or to ‘re-centralise while decentralising’ (Agrawal, 2001; Ribot et al., 2006).

The central actor of a political system (the forest bureaucracy in our case) intervenes by introducing a new policy programme in response to forest problems (Sadath and Krott, 2012). This development follows general theories according to which forests bureaucrats do not merely implement political decisions for problem-oriented and uniform delivery of public service but pursue their organisational and personal interests as well (c.f. Sadath et al., 2013, Rosati, 1981, Giessen et al., 2014). Forest bureaucracies are likely to produce outcomes that consolidate their interests through the creation of ‘forest-friendly’ subjects and identities in environmental discourses (Arts, 2014; Schusser et al., 2015; Krott et al., 2014). Hence, forest bureaucracies often design new mechanisms or strategies through which they regain and maintain control over community forest resources (Basnyat et al., 2019). Technical narrative-driven requirements for official and permanent transfers of forest rights to forest user groups may establish ample opportunities for re-centralisation since technical domination and (apparent) professionalisation helps to return power over forests to the forest administration (Faye, 2015; Lund, 2015). Accordingly, SciFM is likely to be one among several re-centralisation tactics within the field of decentralised forestry since it returns decision-making power to the forest bureaucracy (Sahide et al., 2016; Ribot et al., 2006).

However, limited knowledge exists on the political and economic consequences of the newly introduced SciFM for forest user groups in Nepal (Rutt et al., 2015; Basnyat et al., 2018b; Baral et al., 2018). This paper analyses “how SciFM changes the dynamics of actors' power relations in Nepal's community forestry, primarily by focusing on who gains and who loses –and through which mechanisms. This enables us to understand how an actor (the forest bureaucracy) can use rules, arguments in the discourse, and ideology to strengthen its power (Raik et al., 2008). Hence, the paper contributes to the emerging academic literature on the means and ways through which the forest bureaucracies attempt to regain control over decentralised forest resources.