Expanding department capacity to work with forest communities

This article is the second part of a Working Paper concerned with management of the Shivalik Hill system (which extends from Nepal to Pakistan at the base of the Himalayas). This article describes the collaboration between various Government departments, the main one being the Haryana Forest Department (HFD) and the Hill Resource Management Societies (HRMS). The purpose of the collaboration was the formation of a joint management agreement on forest usage. As part of this process village meetings were held to discuss resource access problems, base maps (1:5,000) were provided on which local people marked the features they considered to be of environmental importance. Beat level profiles were found to be useful in identifying inter- and intra-village resource conflicts.