Beyond the trees: Equity and justice in Nepal’s forest restoration

We examined equity and justice in forest restoration programs in Madhesh province in Nepal. We selected four sites that have three different tenure regimes, namely, community forest (Baghbhairav and Musahar), collaborative forest management (Tamagadhi), and forest protection area (Dhanushadham). The primary data were collected through focus group discussion, key informant interviews, field observations, and forest cover change analysis. We used ArcGIS to perform a spatial overlay analysis to identify the forest cover dynamic (1990, 2000, 2010, and 2022), followed by an examination of equity and justice under its four dimensions: contextual, procedural, distributive, and recognition. Atlas.ti, a computer-assisted software, was used to create codes, sub-themes, and themes from qualitative information, which were then used for further interpretations. Our findings indicated that while forest cover in the study sites is changing rapidly, with temporal and spatial variation across the sites, restoration and equity are inextricably linked and mutually reinforce each other. We also identified visible interactions among the four dimensions of equity, with each contributing to restoration in a different way. The paper concludes that multiple factors undermine forest restoration, among them, equity and justice,community heterogeneity, weak tenure rights, and conflicts over forest benefits sharing are the prominent. The findings imply that, for successful restoration, equity and justice must be considered as the core elements for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons.