Private Forests Nationalization Act in Nepal

After Nepal’s democratic revolution in 1950/51, its new parliament passed legislation that nationalized private forests. The objective was to protect the precious Terai forests from being cut down by private landowners for land clearings. This brought unintended consequences, however: threatened private forest owners decided to cut down their forests in order to declare them as cultivable land rather than forests. This led to massive deforestation in Nepal, considerably harming the country’s ecosystems. The failure of forest nationalization led to the emergence of the more sustainable community forestry in Nepal after the 1970s.