Village 4 community forest, Almora District, Uttarakhand, India

The community forests discussed in this case study are called panchayat forests. They are managed by local institutions called van panchayats. The forests and van panchayats all lie in the middle Himalayan ranges in Almora district, India. Almora is one of the eight mountainous districts that together comprise the Uttarakhan in Uttar Pradesh. The analysis focuses on the effects of institutional rules on fodder and fuelwood use in community forests. Village 4 is one of six villages locaged in the Almora district.

(1) Boundary Rules: Success. Users fall into two categories: the residents of the village where the forest is located; the family of an individual who aided in creating the panchayat forest (p. 271).

(2) Appropriation Rules (Allocation Rules): Fail. Panchayat have not designed rules to match withdrawn regeneration. Rules fail to facilitate the metering of withdrawal from the resource (p. 272). The villagers used rules that implicitly treated different caste groups unequally (p. 282).

(3) Monitoring: Fail. There were not even institutionalized mechanisms through which adequate information on rule breaking could be collected (p. 282). The panchayat did not employ a guard for most of the year (p. 276). Panchayat officials did not emphasize monitoring (p. 276). Monitoring seemed to be prompted by a desire to persecute the Harijans (p. 282).

(4) Sanctioning: Fail. In the absence of accurate information about rule breaking, sanctions could not be imposed in village 4 (p. 282).

(5) Arbitration: Fail. Arbitration, which is important to reinforce sanctions, was ineffective (p. 282). In the absence of accurate information about rule breaking, panchayat officials could not assert their authority as arbiters (p. 282). Village 4 spends a much smaller portion of their expenses on monitoring and legal expenses (p. 280).