Forest Tenure Regimes of Nepal: Community, Leasehold & Collaborative

Nepal's umbrella forest law is the Forests Act, 2019 (Ban Ain, 2076), authenticated on 27 Ashwin 2076 BS (14 October 2019 AD). It replaced the Forest Act, 2049 (1993 AD) and rewrote forest tenure for the federal era. A common exam trap is the name itself: the older 'Forest Act, 2019' refers to 2019 BS (1961 AD), while the current 'Forests Act, 2019' is the 2019 AD statute — always check whether a source is quoting Bikram Sambat or Gregorian years.

The Act first separates private forest (grown on private land) from national forest (everything else, with land ownership vested in the Government of Nepal under Section 3). Its preamble and definitions then set out six management modalities for national forest: government-managed forest, forest conservation area (ban sanrakshan kshetra), community forest (samudayik ban), partnership or collaborative forest (sajhedari ban), leasehold forest (kabuliyati ban) and religious forest (dharmik ban). The same preamble commits the state to promoting private, public and urban forests — which is why textbooks and Loksewa syllabi often speak of 'seven-plus' forest management modalities in Nepal, sometimes also counting agro-forestry.

Administration is layered across the federation. The federal Ministry of Forests and Environment (MoFE) and its Department of Forests and Soil Conservation (DoFSC) set policy, while day-to-day forest administration sits with the seven provinces: after restructuring, 77 district forest offices were replaced by 84 Division Forest Offices and 528 sub-division offices. The Divisional Forest Officer is the pivotal legal actor — the officer who hands over community and religious forests and recommends collaborative arrangements. Crucially, no handover transfers land ownership; user groups receive management and use rights only.

A community forest is a part of national forest handed over under Section 18 to a community forest user group (CFUG) formed under Section 31. Once registered at the Division Forest Office, a CFUG is an autonomous, perpetual corporate body (Section 32) that may develop, conserve and manage the forest and — a right unique among the modalities — independently fix prices for and sell forest products according to its approved operational plan (karyayojana). The group may also run forest enterprises and ecotourism programmes, and can even allocate part of the forest to members below the poverty line for income generation under Section 18(9).

The Act imposes spending discipline in return: under Section 22, a CFUG must spend at least 25 percent of its annual income on forest development, conservation and management, and at least 50 percent of the remainder on poverty reduction, women's empowerment and enterprise development in coordination with the local government. If a group violates its plan or harms the environment, the Divisional Forest Officer may cancel its registration and take the forest back (Section 19); the group can appeal to the Province Forest Director within 35 days, and a forest may be re-handed over under Section 20.

Community forestry grew out of the Panchayat Forest and Panchayat Protected Forest Rules of 2035 BS (1978 AD), was mainstreamed by the Master Plan for the Forestry Sector (1989) and the Forest Act 2049 (1993), and is now the world-famous backbone of Nepali forestry. According to Department of Forests data (2017), 22,266 CFUGs manage 2,237,670 hectares — about 79 percent of all community-based forestry area — benefiting roughly 2.9 million households in all seven provinces, from 512 groups in Madhesh to more than 4,400 in Bagmati. The groups are federated nationally through FECOFUN, the Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal, founded in 1995.

A leasehold forest is degraded national forest — defined in Section 26 as forest with less than 20 percent crown coverage — provided under a lease agreement. The Act keeps two tracks. The institutional track lets the Government of Nepal lease such forest to legally established organisations for defined purposes. The pro-poor track, under Section 26(2), lets the Division Forest Office hand degraded forest to groups of people below the poverty line for income-generating programmes that also restore the forest.

Under the forest regulations, leases have typically run for 40 years and are renewable, with pro-poor groups usually comprising around 5–15 poor households. Nepal has experimented with forest leasing since the Leasehold Forest Rules of 1978, but the pro-poor programme took off under the Forest Act 2049 (1993) and the IFAD-supported Hills Leasehold Forestry and Forage Development Project launched in 1993. Department of Forests data (2017) record 7,484 pro-poor leasehold forest groups managing 43,317 hectares of degraded forest and involving about 71,753 poor families — small in area (about 1.5 percent of community-based forestry land) but explicitly targeted at the poorest.

If a lessee works against the plan or damages the forest, the Divisional Forest Officer may take the leasehold forest back under Section 27; an aggrieved party can appeal to the Director General of the Department of Forests and Soil Conservation within 35 days, whose decision is final. Forest returned from a lease is managed as government-managed forest.

Collaborative forest management (CFM) was designed for the large, contiguous, commercially valuable sal forests of the Terai, Inner Terai and Chure, where community forestry proved harder to apply because users are numerous and often live far from the forest. Introduced through the Forest Policy of 2000 (2057 BS) and an operational guideline in 2011, CFM gained full statutory backing through the second amendment (2016) of the Forest Act 1993 and now stands in Sections 23–25 of the Forests Act 2076.

Under Section 23, the Province Ministry responsible for forests may, on the recommendation of the Divisional Forest Officer, designate part of a government-managed forest as a collaborative forest managed jointly by three partners: the Division Forest Office, the local government(s) and the forest users, whose traditional users organise as a collaborative forest user group under Section 24. The officer prepares the scheme's work plan in consultation with the local level and the user group, and the Province Forest Director approves it. If the partners fail to perform, the Province Ministry can terminate the arrangement and the forest automatically reverts to government management.

Benefit sharing distinguishes CFM from community forestry: income does not belong wholly to users. Under the pre-2019 framework reported in the forestry literature, timber and fuelwood income was split roughly 50 percent to the user group, 10 percent to local government and 40 percent to the forest administration; the 2076 Act leaves the split 'as prescribed' and obliges the users' share to follow the same 25 percent forest-development and 50 percent poverty-focused spending rules as CFUGs (Section 25). As of the Department of Forests' 2017 statistics, 30 collaborative forests covered 76,012 hectares across 12 Terai districts, involving about 864,015 households — the second-largest community-based regime after community forestry.

Government-managed forest (Section 14) is the default residual category: any national forest not handed over as a conservation area, community, collaborative, religious or leasehold forest must be managed by the state. The Divisional Forest Officer delineates such forest and manages it under a strategic plan approved by the Government of Nepal, with provinces preparing conservation and utilisation arrangements for forests inside their boundaries (Section 11).

A forest conservation area (Sections 15–17) is declared by the federal Ministry of Forests and Environment, in consultation with the Province Ministry, through a notice in the Nepal Gazette. Grounds include national or international environmental, ecological, scientific or cultural importance, sensitive watersheds, forests and wildlife outside protected areas, and ecotourism potential; the government may also declare such areas biological corridors for wildlife. 'Protected forests' declared under the 1993 Act — ten of them covering 190,809 hectares by 2017, such as Panchase and Barandabhar — converted automatically into forest conservation areas when the 2076 Act commenced (Section 17).

A religious forest (dharmik ban, Sections 28–30) is national forest around an age-old religious site that the Divisional Forest Officer entrusts to a legally established religious body, group or community for conservation. The handover confers no ownership, and forest products may be used only for religious purposes — commercial sale is barred, except products cleared during approved development works, which may be sold in coordination with the Division Forest Office and local government. Felling that causes significant environmental harm or erosion is prohibited. Department of Forests statistics (2017) list just 36 religious forests over about 2,056 hectares — the smallest modality, valued for culture rather than livelihoods.

A private forest is one planted or conserved on land privately owned under prevailing law. Registration is voluntary: the owner applies to the local government (rural municipality or municipality) with a recommendation from the Division or Sub-division Forest Office, and the local level issues the registration certificate (Section 35). The Act gives owners strong guarantees — private forests 'shall not be nationalised' (Section 35(4)), and owners may develop, manage, price and sell their forest products freely, needing local-government approval only for commercial collection and transport, and Division Forest Office approval for movement between local levels (Section 36).

Two newer, municipality-led categories complete the list. Under Section 37, a local government may develop, conserve and manage forest on public land and use or sell its products, while roadside, canal-side and religious-site trees may be felled only through the prescribed procedure. Under Section 38, a local government may develop urban forests (sahari ban) in towns and settlements — along public roads and in parks — either itself or in partnership with organisations or the private sector, with mandatory technical support from the Division Forest Office.

Agro-forestry (krishi ban) is best understood as a cross-cutting activity rather than a separate tenure chapter: Section 26(1)(c) allows leasehold forests to be used for agro-forestry crops and livestock, and Section 36(7) lets any person, institution, group or community practise agro-forestry, herb farming and even wildlife farming subject to prescribed standards. The Forest Regulation, 2079 (2022 AD) elaborates the working procedures for these provisions, which is why some official lists present agro-forest and urban forest as Nepal's seventh and eighth management modalities.

The three community-based regimes are easy to confuse but differ on who benefits, what forest is handed over, and who keeps the income. A community forest goes to all willing local users regardless of wealth, can be any national forest suitable for community management, and virtually all income stays with the group. A pro-poor leasehold forest goes exclusively to small groups of below-poverty-line households, must be degraded forest (under 20 percent crown cover), and runs on a fixed 40-year renewable lease. A collaborative forest targets large productive Terai blocks, is co-managed rather than handed over, and shares income among users, local governments and the state.

One related regime sits outside the Forests Act altogether: buffer zone community forests around national parks and reserves, created under the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act, 2029 (1973). By 2017 there were 608 such groups managing 144,010 hectares. Adding everything together, more than 30,400 community-based groups managed about 2.83 million hectares — roughly 47.5 percent of Nepal's 5.96 million hectares of forest (Department of Forest Research and Survey, 2015; Department of Forests, 2017) — involving over 4.2 million households, one of the world's largest devolutions of forest tenure.