The study investigated the mechanisms through which the forest bureaucracy regain power over and maximise benefits from community forests in Nepal. Four different practices in community forestry formed the points of entry for the research; (a) revisions of community forest user groups' management (operational) plans, (b) promotion and implementation of socalled scientific forestry practices, (c) bureaucratic practices of community forest policy implementation, and (d) the practices of commercial timber production and sale. Based on these four independent yet interlinked cases, the study documents; (a) the forest bureaucracy's recentralisation tactics, (b) the forest bureaucracy's motives to re-centralise, (c) the role of other actors in strengthening/weakening re-centralisation processes and (d) the consequences for community forest user groups (CFUGs).
The study relies on a power centred political economy approach. It brings together different actor-oriented power theories, namely, Actor-centered power, Bureaucratic politics, Streetlevel bureaucracy and Theory of Access to understand the politics of re-centralisation in Nepal's community forestry sector. The study followed a critical ethnographic approach with an intensive fieldwork in six CFUGs employing a qualitative methodology through semistructured interviews, focus group discussions, direct observation, and document analysis. Besides, a rapid survey was carried out in 74 CFUGs to understand their relationship with the forest bureaucracy focusing on discretion, accountability and control over the forest resources.
Re-centralisation is about the recapture of once decentralised authority, i.e. decision-making powers over resources and revenue flow, in this case, forest and timber resources as well as revenues from commercial timber production. In Nepal, re-centralisation of the community forestry sector has not primarily occurred through policy and legislative reforms but through what one might call everyday practices of bureaucratic resistance. The forest bureaucracy has constantly designed new mechanisms or strategies to re-centralise decentralised forest resources to generate official and unofficial revenues while maintaining control over community forests from a distance. These mechanisms include:
• Legal-sounding practices: These comprise practices, which are not required by law but treated and communicated as if they were. The forest bureaucracy has introduced different provisions in the community forest management plans, which run against the letter and spirit of the 1993 Forest Act. Most prominently are bureaucratically imposed requirements for revising the plans and the introduction of 'expiry dates' to such management plans which has enhanced the bureaucrats' power as well as rent-seeking opportunities and curtailed the autonomy of the CFUGs.
• Technical-sounding arguments: Technical narrative-driven requirements for official and permanent transfers of forest rights to CFUGs in Nepal has generated a regime of technical domination, which establishes ample opportunities for ‘technical-sounding’ re-centralisation. Through a legitimising myth of “scientificness,” the forest bureaucracy creates an illusion among CFUGs that scientific forestry is all about maximising the sustainable harvest from community forests through advanced silvicultural techniques, while in reality, it is about controlling decentralised forest resources, and associated revenue flows. Moreover, technocratic approaches have made the forest bureaucracy powerful while weakening user groups’ control over their community forests.
• Bureaucratic re-centralisation: Under this practice, the forest bureaucracy maintains or regains control in ways that differ from traditional centralised, top-down approaches. The bureaucrats selectively enforce official rules and introduce schematic instructions that bypass and go beyond official policy while establishing different legal and extralegal processes as well as mechanisms. First, they create a crisis that justifies a need for regulating the forests user groups’ resources using their authority under the 1993 Forest Act and 1995 Forest Rule to devise and enforce several guidelines and decrees. Then, they develop regulation practices that officially address the crises while consolidating
or increasing their control over community forest resources as convenient side-effects. Finally, they provide selective information to justify certain activities and actions.
• Collusion to promote self-interests: Actors collude with other actors to promote their self-interest through the creation of win-win opportunities for those involved in the processes while undermining legislative requirements and ignoring likely adverse consequences to the population, whom they are supposed to be accountable to, i.e. CFUGs. For example, forest bureaucrats collude with development partners to include their interests such as climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, improvement of marginalised people’s livelihoods in CFUGs' management plans. Development organisations pay the forest bureaucrats to 'update' expired CFUG management plans, and the forest bureaucrats simply add the necessary pieces of text in the CFUGs' management plans. Similarly, to gain access to standing timber, timber merchants collude with forest bureaucrats by paying them unofficial fees and forest bureaucrats as well as timber merchants colluded with CFUGs by helping them to comply with overly complicated technical and bureaucratic procedures required to harvest and market their own timber.
Re-centralisation motives of the forest bureaucracy are largely endogenous, such as compliance with ministerial and departmental instructions; opportunities for professional career growth, where area brought under scientific forest management and the generation of forest revenue are major assessment criteria for performance evaluation; controlling resources and revenue from a distance; making CFUGs upwardly accountable towards them but not to the members; and extracting unofficial revenues. However, re-centralisation has also occurred for exogenous reasons, especially threats from external actors. For example, the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) issued many instructions to the Ministry of Forests and Environment (forest bureaucracy) that compelled the forest bureaucracy to introduce schematic directives, which bypass and go beyond official policy and rules. Most prominently, in 2012 the Ministry of Forests and Environment issued a decree stating that community forest management plans cannot be approved unless the estimated growing stock is at or below the national average of 178 cubic meters per ha. This was the Ministry's response to the CIAA on their discovery that the growing stock volume for some community forests had been deliberately overestimated to make, de facto, overharvesting appears sustainable –on-paper. In addition to prosecuting the involved forest bureaucrats and user group leaders, The CIAA also instructed the Ministry of Forests and Environment to invent and implement procedures that would prevent similar incidents in the future.
Re-centralisation has happened through "very dynamic processes" of actions and reactions by different actors. Major actors who can directly or indirectly influence the community forests policy include; the forest bureaucracy, development partners (donors), Right-holder organisations, CFUGs, and external actors, like the CIAA. In the context of community forestry, each actor has deliberately or not, knowingly or unknowingly strengthened recentralisation processes, while none have openly resisted such initiatives and remained silent observers. This had happened mainly because each actor-group has managed to promote their interests or desires in community forestry. While the CFUGs accept the ‘rules of the game’ without understanding the subtle details of ‘the game’, right holder organisations, like FECOFUN (the Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal) has never carried out organised resistance to the forest bureaucracy's increasing governance through administrative circulars and guidelines. Moreover, development partners' uncritical acceptance of technical and legal-sounding arguments from the forest bureaucracy has undermined the autonomy of CFUGs while serving hidden interests of the bureaucracy. Paradoxically, none of the actors has voiced concerns over the discrepancies between community forest policy on-paper and its implementation in practice.
Forest user groups have lost much of their original rights to manage their forest resources under the forestry legalisation as the forest bureaucracy has expanded its involvement in all aspects of community forestry. This rent-seeking culture is now shifting towards a "rent-seizing culture", where the bureaucrats position themselves as gatekeepers between CFUGs and their forest resources and between timber in the forests and the timber market. This way, forest bureaucrats generate rents for both the state (government) as well as for themselves. Hence, recentralisation has resulted in a new form of the corruption in community forestry; "collusive corruption without illegality", i.e. corrupt practices that shift timber revenues from CFUGs to the forest bureaucracy, CFUG leaders, and the timber buyers without over-harvesting the community forests.
Although Nepal is moving towards a federal political structure, which also affects the forestry sector, re-centralisation of community forestry is likely to expand in the absence of organised resistance. Official policy and the law are on the side of CFUGs. But to resist and effectively fight, de facto, processes of re-centralisation, they need to get organised and capacitated to exercise and insist on their legal rights to community forests and associated revenue streams. Hence the priority of the policymakers and development partners should be to strengthen decentralised forest governance that supports biophysically sustainable and economically rational as well as equitable forest management.