ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the interplay between changing everyday dynamics of community forestry and associated socio-economic transformations in Nepal. The increased outmigration, growing wildlife depredation, neoliberalization of the commons, and the market integration of community economies have swiftly transformed rural communities’ mode of economic production toward commercial endeavors and consumerism, thereby underutilizing and idling farmlands and forests. Getting insights from historical materialism and conjunctural analysis, the chapter explores how community and forest transitions are shaped by the conjuncture of forces such as outmigration, market interventions, urbanization, consumerism, and neoliberal restructuring of rural economy. It argues that remittance, decreased farm production, energy use shift, increased need for cash, climate change, and disasters have resulted in weak collective action, passive forest management, and shifting perception of forests from resource to risk. The chapter suggests that a flexible, resilient, and federalized community forestry could accommodate both subsistence and commercial utilization of resources by adopting watershed and landscape models of management.
