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.

The study documents practices of 28 community-based forest enterprises (CBFEs) in Nepal, representing different enterprise models - FUGs (CFUGs or LFUGs), networks, cooperatives, and companies. FUGs are primarily constrained by their limited scale in terms of membership and land area. The formation of intergroups and networks minimizes this limitation. Networks are often constrained from doing group enterprises since they do not have legal identity to transact as a group and this constraint can be overcome by registering as a formal business entity - either as a cooperative or a company.