In recent years, awareness has grown in Nepal and globally regarding two of community forestry’s most critical challenges: equity and livelihoods. Yet even as understanding of these challenges has improved, actors from the local to the national levels in Nepal continue to be confronted with the dilemma of how to address these challenges in such a diverse, complex and dynamic context. This synthesis explores an adaptive collaborative approach to governance and management as one avenue to meet these challenges. This approach integrates inclusive decision making, networking, social learning, and pro active adjustments of practice and policies based on learning. The synthesis’ lessons are drawn from a six-year partnership-based research initiative in Nepal—spearheaded by the Center for International Forestry Research—which spanned the local, district and national levels. Key points of learning discussed in this book include factors, processes and arrangements that support—or limit—adaptive and collaborative capacities, such as active facilitation, ‘nested’ decision making, and learning-based monitoring. The book also explores both the conceptual underpinnings of the approach as well as its effects in research sites, including in terms of benefits for the poor, women and other traditionally marginalised people. This book is intended as a resource for policy makers and civil society practitioners alike, as well as researchers and others interested in pro-equity and livelihood innovations in community forestry. Through its clear conceptual and research lesson focus, this synthesis complements and is a sister publication to the hands-on guidebook entitled Facilitating Forests of Learning.

This book examines the value of Adaptive Collaborative Management for facilitating learning and collaboration with local communities and beyond, utilising detailed studies of forest landscapes and communities. Many forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies, such as the Million Tree Initiatives, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and REDD+, often neglecting local communities. In the context of the climate crisis, it is imperative that local peoples and communities are an integral part of all decisions relating to resource management. Rather than being seen as beneficiaries or people to be safeguarded, they should be seen as full partners, and Adaptive Collaborative Management is an approach which priorities the rights and roles of communities alongside the need to address the environmental crisis. The volume presents detailed case studies and real life examples from across the globe, promoting and prioritizing the voices of women and scholars and practitioners from the Global South who are often under-represented. Providing concrete examples of ways that a bottom-up approach can function to enhance development sustainably, via its practitioners and far beyond the locale in which they initially worked, this volume demonstrates the lasting utility of approaches like Adaptive Collaborative Management that emphasize local control, inclusiveness and local creativity in management. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development and natural resource management and development studies more broadly. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

The contexts range from farmer field schools, to floodplain management and community forestry.