USER’S PERCEPTION ON SCIENTIFIC FOREST MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN COMMUNITY FOREST OF NEPAL

The government of Nepal has initiated scientific forest management practices in community forests by integrating the silvicultural system rather than considering users local knowledge and practices on forests management. This integrated forest management enhances the productivity and revenue through management of the productive forest. Managing the forest of Nepal has been a big challenge in the recent year but very less is seen to be done to solve the problem. As a result, forest condition of Nepal has gone worse making the environment vulnerable to a number of problems. In this situation, the present research has been conducted to assess the potentiality and constraints of implementing scientific forest management in the community forest.

This study had adopted household survey, key informant interview, focus group discussion and review of Operational Plan for the data collection. The study calculated the benefit-cost ratio of both traditional and scientific forest management project. The analysis of the Benefit cost ratio (BCR) between traditional management and scientific management showed that users are likely to benefit more from scientific forest management. The study showed that the major challenges for the management of forest scientifically were unaware about the implementation procedure and technique, lack of financial resource, lack of coordination between stakeholders, lack of public participation in every step of SFM. Some users are willing to participate in SFM, mainly due to the incentives they got from implementing the scientific plan. There is a need for user's capacity building through training, workshops and awareness program along with financial support from the government for implementing plan effectively.