# **1.  Introduction**

Only a few years ago, community management of forests was viewed as an experimental strategy. Today, it is a part of government and donor orthodoxy in forestry investment. In many parts of the world, communities living on forest fringes or within forests have regained some control over the management of these resources. For instance, in Nepal, community forest management was instituted in 1993 and is now viewed as a policy that has helped stem forest degradation (Edmonds 2002, Bardhan and others 2002). Klooster (2000) has examples of co-management of forests in Mexico leading to increased profits to local communities; and, Wily (2002) estimates that at least 4,500 rural communities in Africa are involved in some form of forest management. Thus, decentralized forestry is a worldwide phenomenon. The rights of local forestry communities have been strengthened either through management-sharing arrangements with the state, increased legal access to forests, or decentralization within government agencies.

Decentralized forestry has benefited from donor support, numerous studies documenting the ability of communities to efficiently manage common-pool resources, and a shared consensus among development practitioners about the benefits of decentralization. Yet, it is not clear that we understand the impacts community-oriented forestry. Does participating in decentralized forest management result in extraction of more or less forest products? Are there any differences in forest income between participating and nonparticipating households? Does this form of forest management improve the welfare of poor households? Does community forestry result in conservation of resources? These are some of the questions that require answers. In this paper, we seek to partially answer these questions by analyzing data on community based forest management in rural India.

While there are numerous case studies that evaluate community forestry, very few are based on large datasets and present quantitative results that are generalizable to more than a few communities. Edmonds (2002) studies the impact of community forestry on resource extraction in Nepal; this is one of the few efforts to quantitatively assess whether this government program had an impact of fuelwood extraction. Edmonds shows that there is an approximately 14% reduction in fuelwood extraction that can be attributed to the creation of forest user groups in the short-term. He builds on a tradition of quantitative program evaluation that is well established in the development literature but is relatively unknown in environmental studies. We use similar evaluation techniques to assess the impact of community forestry in India on fuelwood consumption.

Our study focuses on community forestry in India. We are interested in a government program known as Joint Forest Management (JFM) as well as traditional village level forestry institutions. JFM was launched in the early 1990s and made it possible for the forestry department to involve people and communities in the management of certain forests. JFM caught on very quickly, and by 2001 some 45,000 JFM groups were protecting approximately 12 million hectares of government forests (Kumar, 2002).<sup>1</sup> However, several authors and practitioners contend that JFM falls short of its goals, and 1 The total land area coming under community management is likely to be much higher as the above figures do not include the many traditional groups which are not recognized under JFM.

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