Nepal entered into people? participatory forest management practice due to the inability of Government to protect Ban (Forest) with the Gun. Ultimately, feeling the need of local people in conservation, forest management regime gradually transformed into people? participatory system of conservation.

Forest acts as the foundation of rural Nepalese economy which provides both tangible as well as intangible benefits. Nepal is practicing community forestry (CF) for sustainable management and utilization of forest resources for more than 30 years with twin objectives of forest conservation and poverty reduction at the same time. Till this date 17,685 community forests are managed directly by about 1.45 million people which is about more than one third of households of Nepal i.e. 35% household of Nepal. CF is successful example of decentralization in forest resource management whereas we are just talking about decentralization in national administrative level.

 Nepalese forestry history has traveled from Industrial model to ?Forest in development: a vital balance? so far.

After the declaration of Millennium Development Goals in 2000, the perception toward the forest resources changed more dramatically and started to look it as a vital tool to achieve many MDGs. The government also started to believe that uplifting the income of rural people and reducing poverty can be done through forestry and acknowledged in the state policies like poverty reduction strategy, Tenth Five Years Plan (2002-2007) and Agriculture Development policy. Similarly, eliminating gender disparity, Sustainable Development safe drinking water etc can be achieved through the management practice available forest.

After embracing Community Forestry in 1978, many new issues arose till today which are influenced by education, increasing political awareness of people and perhaps by globalization as well. The issues related to women participation, Corruption, benefit sharing, right of indigenous and dalit communities, inclusion, transparency, accountability, participatory decision making process and equity etc are highly trumpeted subjects in recent years. Collectively, these are termed as forest governance and when linked with economic aspect can be called as political economy of Community forestry.

Some of these issues are hygienic to arise and fosters socioeconomic condition of people along with forest conservation. Increased smuggling of timber from Nepal to India sometimes from India to China using Nepalese land is also occurring due to liquid political and security scenario. In addition, rapid encroachment of forest area, rapid deforestation ( Nepalese forest suffered most during 10 years civil war), lack of transparency and accountability of projects in Urban and rural areas, misuse of foreign funds, road,  water reservoir construction in forested areas, etc are occurring under the political mask. These are created by national transition phase leading to fluid political and economic situation. In politically unstable countries like present Nepal, national plans and policies are not formulated on time which ultimately leads to ineffective and irrational management of forest. Similarly, policies promoting forest based enterprises are also lacking.