Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Forest Policy and Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/forpol Re-centralisation through fake Scientificness: The case of community forestry in Nepal Bijendra Basnyat a,b,⁎ , Thorsten Treue b , Ridish Kumar Pokharel a , Srijana Baral a,b , Yam Bahadur Rumba a a Institute of Forestry, Tribhuvan University, Hariyokharka, Pokhara 33700, Nepal b Department of Food and Resource Economics, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 25, DK-1958 Frederiksberg C, Denmark ABSTRACT This paper explains how powerful actors use scientific forestry narratives to regain power over decentralised forest resources. Through elements of trust, incentives, coercion, and avoidance forest bureaucrats convince forest user groups of the need to implement so-called scientific management and planning principles to obtain predictable harvests. In reality, however, these principles replicate colonial-style Indian forest management and expand the involvement of forest bureaucrats in all aspects of community forestry to re-gain resource control and establish rent-seeking opportunities for forest bureaucrats. In this process, forest user groups lose authority over and income from their forests. We define this as “technical-sounding re-centralisation” since the forest bureaucracy has re-captured decision-making power over forest resources and associated revenue through narratives of scientific forestry. We argue that today's colonial-style re-centralised governance of communityforestsmustgivewaytoforestmanagementprinciples,whichdevolvedecision-makingpowerstolocalcommunitieswhileensuringconservationthrough utilisation, and reasonable taxation. 1. Introduction In Nepal, state failure to conserve and manage forest resources lead to the emergence of community forestry in the late seventies (Acharya, 2002; Ojha, 2014). Community Forestry involves a time-unlimited transfer of forest management authority to forest user groups for pro- tection, management, harvesting, and sale of forest products that forest user groups hold full ownership to while the State maintains formal ownership to the land (GoN, 1995; GoN, 1993). In the early 1990s, when community forestry in Nepal focused mostly on forest protection and subsistence use, the technical requirements to community forest management plans were modest. However, concurrently with forest user groups' increasing supply of timber to the commercial market, which was previously dominated by the parastatal Timber Corporation Nepal, the promotion of scientific forestry as a necessary means to prevent overharvesting by forest user groups has gained political trac- tion, especially after the Forest Policy was revised in the year 2000. In 2014, the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation (now Ministry of Forests and Environment) introduced a silviculture-based management system for community forests, popularly known as “Scientific forest management”(SciFM),whichemphasisestheuseoftechnical/scientific knowledge in forest management planning and harvesting decisions with the active involvement of forest technicians (MFSC, 2014). The legacy of scientific forestry is expanding even in the community forests of Nepal (Basnyat et al., 2018a). At present, the Ministry is promoting SciFM in more than 200 community forests across one-third of all dis- tricts in Nepal (Paudel et al., 2017; DoF, 2016). Scientific forestry is rooted in the perception that the application of scientifically proven methods to manipulate forest environments is the best way to ensure efficient and sustainable production of commercial timber (e.g. Lanz, 2000). The basic theory of scientific forestry is ap- pealingly simple; Over the long-term, the harvest and mortality of de- sired species must not exceed their re-growth. To calculate the eco- nomically optimal annual cut, one needs knowledge about the annual growth, which differs between species and varies within the lifespan of an individual species. Further, one must take into consideration the present and desired composition of growing species, including their age classes. Assessing a forests' growing stock (static inventory) requires re- cording and measurement of growing trees within a sufficiently large number of temporary sample plots to allow for statistically sound esti- mates of growing volumes within species and age (or size) classes. If species and age or size-specific knowledge about growth rates exist, one can use the static inventory to calculate the estimated annual growth within species and size-classes (dynamic inventory). The generation of such scientific forest management data is, however, expensive. So, the costs of performing a statistically sound calculation of annual desired cuts will often outweigh the economic benefits in small and difficult to accessforestsorinforestsdominatedbyyoungorinvaluabletreespecies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2020.102147 Received 18 July 2019; Received in revised form 1 February 2020; Accepted 11 March 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Institute of Forestry, Tribhuvan University, Hariyokharka, Pokhara 33700, Nepal. E-mail addresses: bbasnyat@yahoo.com (B. Basnyat), ttr@ifro.ku.dk (T. Treue). Forest Policy and Economics 115 (2020) 102147 1389-9341/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T