ABSTRACT
For more than 40 years, Nepal has been engaged in supporting highly innovative and radical approaches to forest management, forging new political relationships between the state and its citizens focused on the control and access to forest resources. These new relationships were often in advance of wider political change and built an important arena for social change through forest-based social movements that contributed to the major peoples’ movements of the 1990s. The Constitution of 2015 has ushered in a new federal political system, redefining the relationship between political and natural resource institutions. This chapter examines the history of forests and community forestry in Nepal and how they intertwine with the social and political context.
