What is CFUG (Community Forest User Group)?

A Community Forest User Group (CFUG) is the local institution at the heart of Nepal's community-forestry programme. It is a self-governing group of the households that live around a particular patch of national forest and who, together, are given the legal right to protect, manage and use that forest. Under the Forest Act 1993 and the Forest Regulation 1995, a CFUG is recognised as an independent, self-governed, autonomous corporate body: once formed and registered it can hold a bank account, own movable and immovable property, sue and be sued, and make and enforce its own rules.

The forest a CFUG manages remains national (state) forest in terms of ownership of the land, but the standing trees, grass, fodder, firewood, timber and other products are handed over to the group to manage and use according to an agreed plan. In this way community forestry separates ownership of the land from the rights to use and manage it, devolving day-to-day control to the people who depend on the forest. CFUGs are deliberately formed around use rather than residence or administrative boundaries, so the membership is the set of genuine 'forest users' — typically the households of one or more villages — regardless of their caste, wealth or where exactly they live.

Group size varies enormously, reflecting how local the institution is. Reported CFUG membership ranges from around ten households to several hundred or more, and the forest area each group looks after is similarly variable — from under one hectare to several hundred hectares.

Forming a CFUG is a formal, multi-step process carried out with the District (or Division) Forest Office, the local arm of the government forest administration. The interested users first organise themselves and draft a constitution, which lists the member households, defines who the users are and sets out how the group will govern itself. They then prepare an Operational Plan (OP) — a management plan for the forest, usually based on a forest-resource inventory and often drawn up with the help of a forest-office ranger — which specifies what may be harvested, how much, when and by whom, and how the forest will be protected and regenerated. The forest office conducts a field verification of the plan; once the constitution and operational plan are found acceptable and certified, the forest is formally handed over to the group as a 'community forest'.

Internally, every CFUG has two main bodies. The General Assembly, made up of representatives of all member households, is the supreme decision-making body: it adopts and amends the constitution and operational plan, sets policy and elects the leadership. It elects an Executive Committee (also called the user committee) for a fixed term to handle day-to-day management, organise forest protection, allocate products and keep accounts. To promote inclusion, regulations require that women make up a significant share of the committee (commonly cited as at least one-third of members), and many groups also reserve places for disadvantaged and marginalised users.

A CFUG retains the income it earns — from selling timber, firewood, fodder, non-timber forest products, fees and fines — in its own fund. The law requires that a substantial portion of this income be reinvested in forest development, with the remainder spent on community priorities decided collectively in the General Assembly. In practice CFUG funds have paid for village trails, drinking-water schemes, school buildings, scholarships and small loans, which is why the groups are often described not just as forest managers but as grassroots development and self-governance institutions. The constitution and operational plan are typically reviewed and renewed on a roughly five-year cycle.

Community forestry in Nepal grew out of a crisis of confidence in centralised state forestry. After the country's forests were nationalised in 1957, deforestation and degradation in the hills accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s, and the government came to accept that the state alone could not protect or manage all of the national forest. The first formal opening to local participation came in 1978 with the Panchayat Forest Rules and Panchayat Protected Forest Rules, which handed limited areas of plantation and natural forest to the local panchayat (village council) units.

The modern, user-group-based model was shaped by the Master Plan for the Forestry Sector, prepared in the late 1980s and adopted in 1989, which made community forestry one of its priority programmes and recommended devolving forest management directly to the communities of actual users rather than to political units. This thinking was given full legal force by the Forest Act 1993 and the Forest Regulation 1995, which created the CFUG as a legal entity, set out the procedure for handing over national forest as community forest, and recognised CFUGs as autonomous, self-governing corporate bodies. These remain the cornerstone of the programme, supplemented by later forest legislation.

The result has been one of the world's largest and most studied participatory natural-resource programmes. More than 22,000 CFUGs now manage roughly 2.3 million hectares — on the order of a third of Nepal's total forest — and the model is widely credited as one factor in Nepal's forest recovery, with national forest cover rising substantially between the early 1990s and the 2010s. The groups have also been described as 'incubators of democracy' for the experience they give ordinary villagers, especially women, in collective decision-making.

A CFUG should not be confused with the community forest itself: the CFUG is the group of people (the institution), while the community forest is the patch of forest they manage. Nor is it the same as the District or Division Forest Office, which are government bodies that approve plans, provide technical support and oversee CFUGs but do not run them; the relationship is one of partnership and supervision, not ownership. Community forestry is also distinct from other Nepali forest-management categories such as leasehold forestry (forest leased to poor households or groups), collaborative forestry (larger Terai forests co-managed with government), religious forests and private forests — community forestry handed over to a CFUG is just one of several regimes.

The national umbrella body is FECOFUN, the Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal, established in July 1995 as an independent, member-based federation that links CFUGs across the country and advocates for their rights over forests and natural resources. FECOFUN represents the great majority of the country's CFUGs and has organised structures down to the provincial and local levels; it is an advocacy and networking organisation, and is separate from both the individual CFUGs and the government Department of Forests.

Terms a reader is likely to meet alongside CFUG include the Constitution and Operational Plan (the two governing documents), the General Assembly and Executive/User Committee (the two internal bodies), and the CFUG fund (the group's pooled income). Because the programme is so prominent in Nepali public life, 'community forestry' and 'CFUG' are often used loosely as shorthand for community-based natural-resource management in general, but strictly the CFUG is the specific, legally defined group that has been handed a community forest under the Forest Act.