Environment and Ecology Research 4(3): 128-139, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/eer.2016.040304 Forest Commons Use in India: A Case Study of Van Panchayat in the Himalayas Reveals People’s Perception and Characteristics of Management Committee Kazuyo Nagahama 1,* , Kaoru Saito 1 , Misa Masuda 2 , Masahiko Ota 3 , Hem Gairola 4 , Subodh Kumar Kala 5 , Randeep Rakwal 6 1 Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan 2 Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan 3 Learning & Teaching Center, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Japan 4 Garhwal Environment and Education Society, India 5 Forest Department of Uttarakhand, India 6 Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences and Tsukuba International Academy for Sport Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan Copyright©2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract Van (forest) Panchayat (hereafter VP) is one of the largest and most diverse experiments in common property resource management in the Himalayan ranges of the state of Uttarakhand, India. The idea of establishing VP originated in conflicts between people and the British authorities for controlling resources. The people of this region are dependent on the utilization of forest products, such as firewood and non-timber forest products for their livelihood. In this study, a field survey was carried out on VP in the village, named “D” village of Tehri-Garhwal district in the state of Uttarakhand, in order to investigate VPs impact on people’s livelihood with a focus on the participation of the people in forest management. Two study objectives were examined as follows: first, to clarify the people’s perception under the VP, and second, to reveal the characteristics of the VP management committee (MC), which is directly responsible for managing the community forests. We used the semi-structured interview approach to determine the villagers’ perception for the VP activities and condition of the community forest. Results revealed people’s satisfaction with the condition of the VP and common utilization of the forest resources. In case of the MC, people did not appear to show an overall interest such as not joining the meetings and activities. The reason for this can be related to the organization of the MC that was functioning for more than 20 years with the same leadership and almost unchanged MC members. To summarize, people’s participation in the forest utilization was not only dependent on their own personal contribution towards VP activities, but also more importantly, on their involvement in the forest management via the MC. Keywords Van Panchayat, Community-based Forest Management, Management Committee, People’s Participation 1. Introduction In the 1960s and 1970s, pressure on forests in developing countries intensified due to poverty and population growth, in particular India, leading the forest management authorities to recognize the socio-economic aspects of local population such as social forestry. During the early phases of social forestry policy, spanning the 1970s to the 1980s, the primary focus was on how to reduce people’s use of forest resources. For example, programs were developed to provide local people with seedlings for creating woodlots on private land, to establish alternative energy facilities to reduce firewood use, to help in the construction of village infrastructure and / or to promote employment outside of the forests. These social forestry practices resembled integrated conservation and development projects in protected areas after the 1980s [1, 2]. Seemingly good on the surface, there was a drawback in these practices in that the local people were kept away from the decision-making processes regarding the public forests [3]. Until the late 1980s, national forest policies in India emphasized the optimization of commercial forestry, which prohibited local villagers’ access to forests [4]. The result was a rapid and widespread degradation of forests, exposing the failure of top-down state forest resource management policies. Frequent conflicts also arose between the forest department (hereafter, FD) and local forest users, i.e. the villagers. It was then that the local government became aware of the important roles forests have and play in supporting the livelihoods of the local people [5]. In the 1990s, the forestry sector was gradually decentralized to