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SUMMARY This study examines rationales behind the choice of local interlocutors by forestry-related climate change projects in post-conflict Nepal. In their stated objectives, all projects claim to involve the government, and most project decision makers are in favor of government involvement, yet project resources overwhelmingly favor civil society institutions. Project decision makers' choices are shaped by a combination of donor conditionalities, contextual constraints, and beliefs about which institutional attributes matter and how to address historical marginalization. The projects' empowerment of civil society sidesteps opportunities to strengthen the local government, which is described as weak, disinterested, and lacking legitimacy owing to the absence of elections due to the unsettled post-conflict situation. Through the choices made and their justifications, projects and donors further marginalize the local government materially and discursively and thereby entrench its perceived deficiencies. We argue that this privileging of civil society may have implications for government legitimacy and post-conflict reconstruction and call for donors and the intervening institutions they fund to critically and collectively reassess the role of forestry-related climate change projects in the larger process of post-conflict reconstruction in Nepal. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the public finance potential of community forestry in Nepal on the basis of a comprehensive dataset on forest revenue and expenditures of 41 randomly selected community-forest user groups (CFUG) from Gorkha district. The results show that CFUG income distribution is highly skewed; the high- and low-income one-third of CFUGs in the sample account for 74.3 and 4.1% of the total income, respectively. CFUG income depends on age of the CFUG institution, CFUG membership size, and, in particular, on whether the community forest features the valuable timber species Sal (Shorea robusta, C. F. Gaertn.) and/or Chir Pine (Pinus roxburghii Sarg.). CFUG expenditure pattern is also highly skewed, with 85.2% of all public services and infrastructure financed by the one-third high-income CFUGs. CFUG financing of public services and infrastructure is shaped by income, management costs, and socio-political and contextual factors, such as whether the CFUG jurisdiction covers several wards and the presence of existing public infrastructure in the community. Finally, results show that the amounts of revenue generated through community forestry are negligible when compared to households' private gains from extraction of products from community forests, indicating a limited potential for redistribution of benefits under the current taxation system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]