South Asia Forest Tenure Assessment

February 2012

An increasing body of evidence shows that forest governance and tenure reforms are central to mitigating a number of problems related to forests, and seriously affect forest-dependent people. On this backdrop, this assessment of South Asian forest tenure systems was initiated to provide a greater understanding of the tenure trends and status in the region that can potentially inform the policy process. This is the synthesis report of forest tenure assessments prepared by country consultants in five countries in South Asia: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Further supplementary data used in this report were collected from RRI and FAO sources.