Political economy of participatory forestry in Bangladesh

During the last few decades, institutional changes like participatory forest (PF) management programs have become key policy shifts in many of the world's developing countries. Accordingly, Bangladesh's government has placed PF as the priority based program since the 1980s within the direct patronization of donor agencies. Often, PF is treated as the government controlled and donor-funded program in Bangladesh. The premise of this analysis is that existing involvement of stakeholders and their political, economic and administrative power relation led to the complexity in PF management and outcomes. The analyses were outfitted by the two case studies conducted at the Madhupur Sal forests and Hill Forest of the Teknaf Peninsula of Bangladesh from 2011 to 2016. The study argues that PF has no doubt led a new elucidation of forest management with a strategy to include local people so as to improve forest conditions and the livelihood of local communities. On the contrary, the study also found out that the involvement of many stakeholders and their power relation has excluded the rural poor from enjoying the benefit of PF. Moreover, the local Forest Department and a few powerful stakeholders have controlled the participant selection process and made the program more complex for rural people. Based on the study's findings, decentralization of power and exercises of real democracy will be needed. These can be done by excluding the unexpected stakeholders from PF and execution of proper PF rules and regulations at grass-root levels.