Are traditional and modern forestry institutions complementary or do they prescribe contradictory rights in Trans-Himalayan Nepal? A lesson to be learned for REDD+ implementation

Abstract

for their cooperation and comments. I am grateful to the staff of the Department of Geography for providing administrative as well as technical support during my PhD tenure. Special thanks go to Anne-Kathrin Thomassen, Marianne Soltveit and Gro Aase for their support in dealing with the practicalities of the department. I extend thanks to all of the academic staff and to my colleagues at the Department, especially Yograj Gautam, Madan K. Suwal and Kuber P. Bhatta for their cooperation and company, and for sharing many interesting discussions. Thanks also go to Tom Robson, Clare Tompsett and Armando Lamadrid for their cooperation in proofreading my work. I acknowledge the Norwegian State Education Loan Fund (Lånekassen) and the Department of Geography of UiB for their funding support. Thank you so much to the respondents of Dolakha and Mustang for providing enough time to talk with me and for making this research possible. I would also like to thank Aadesh, Aastha, Aayush, Bhimlal, Pradip, Laxmi, Samita and Urmila for their excellent assistance during the periods of fieldwork. I am also thankful to the Nepali Bergen Society (NEBERS) and its members for sharing happy times with me and my family during our stay in Bergen. I would like to express my sincere gratitude and love to my mother and late father, brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews for their untiring love and support, and also a huge thank you to my wife Prashansa and son Saransh for being my source of motivation. I owe them for their love, smiles, support and encouragement.

What is an institution? An ontological debate illustrating community forestry of Nepal

“…So, the reciprocal relation of structure and action through practice within institution, as explained by Anthony Giddens, helps to analyse society more closely than relying on Berger & Luckmann only. However, since human interact with and rely on natural resources for various reasons (e.g., sustaining livelihood) (see Poudel, 2018;2019) institutions for natural resource management conflate peoplenature relation with social institutions and mediate their relationships (Leach et al, 1999;Gupta et al, 2010;Young, 2010), so all humanly used resources are embedded in complex social-ecological systems (Ostrom, 2009). The following section deals with these aspects of the institution.…”