Featured Research Project (December 2002 - January 2003)

Linking Sustainable Forest Management and Poverty Alleviation in the Himachal Pradesh Forestry Project, India

Heather Plumridge, MS (SNRE)
  Thesis Advisors: Dr. Steven Brechin (chair), Dr. Richard Tucker

Project Overview

Joint Forest Management (JFM) has provided a unique opportunity for forest-dependent communities and Forest Departments in India to work collaboratively on natural resource management. The implementation of this community-based forestry program has varied greatly in different states in India. The Himachal Pradesh Forestry Project has used a distinctive model to implement JFM in Northern India. The project has extended beyond the framework of Joint Forest Management to include both sustainability and poverty reduction as main project goals. This thesis project evaluates the outcome of this altered JFM program by looking at local and organizational indicators of broadly defined sustainability.

Goals and Research Methods

Using recent fieldwork, this study analyzes the potentials and problems associated with meeting the Himachal Pradesh Forestry Project’s stated goals of sustainable forest management and poverty reduction. Local stakeholders were interviewed to express their views on changes in social, ecological, and economic indicators in their communities since the inception of the project. These village level outcomes reveal a lack of social, ecological and economic sustainability in the majority of cases.

Findings

This research concludes that the Himachal Pradesh Forestry Project is unsustainable for a number of inter-linked reasons. Limited technology hinders the capacity of the main implementing agency of the project, the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department. The project’s donor, the development agency of the United Kingdom, the Department for International Development (DFID), has assumed that any organization could put this project into practice without recognition of the extreme difficulties associated with balancing social, economic and ecological issues in forest dependent communities. Despite these expectations, the Forest Department does not have the expertise to implement this complex social project without assistance from other organizations.

In summary, the lessons learned from this case reveal the challenges and opportunities associated with the implementation of complex forest management initiatives. Collaborative structures of management are suggested as an alternative to the current project structure. Support networks based on cooperation and communication could be a useful alternative for integrating complex ecological, social and economic processes in the implementation of the Himachal Pradesh Forestry Project.

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