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Summary:

By the mid-nineties more and more Forest User Groups in the Districts of Kabhre Palanchok and Sindhu Palchok had started to take on tasks beyond just forest management. Such tasks included commercial harvesting and sales of forest products, undertaking community development with forest-generated income and federation into networks to undertake joint activities and provide support to other FUGs. In response to this, NACRMP was designed to have a major component providing FUGs with management support. A large part of the work under this component was aimed at institutional strengthening of FUGs (and CDGs) and, to facilitate monitoring, the work was concentrated in the FUGs/CDGs in the 8 Project test sites.

This paper presents a methodology for undertaking institutional assessments of FUGs/CDGs and the results of applying the methodology in 31 FUGs/CDGs of the test sites. The assessments were based on measuring performance in the following organisational areas:

•	Awareness about community forestry policy.
•	Planning and programming.
•	Natural and financial resource mobilisation and management.
•	Administrative management.
•	Linkages with service providers and stakeholders.
•	Community forest management.
•	Gender balance.
•	Equity and participation.

In 1999 assessments were undertaken in 31 FUGs/CDGs providing a baseline against which to later measure the effect of Project interventions on FUG institutional capability. From 1999 onwards all FUGs/CDGs in the test sites, with the exception of Chaubas FUGs, received intensive support by NGOs and the Project aimed at increasing FUG institutional capability. In addition regular technical support by the DFO/DSCO was provided. All FUGs/CDGs were active managers of their natural resources. In 2000/2001 a total of 19 FUGs/CDGs were reassessed. The results of the assessments have been presented in this paper as cobweb charts.

The charts showed that NGO insititutional strengthening work impacted positively on all 8 organisational areas studied and that FUGs/CDGs underwent significant positive changes. However, the results also showed that while there were positive changes in the areas of gender balance and equity/participation, there remained challenges to be addressed. Where there was no NGO support the areas of gender balance and equity/participation, participatory planning, and linkages with service providers remained very weak.

Both the test site approach and the methodology of preparing cobweb charts have proved extremely useful to monitor the effect of Project activities. However, institutional development is a long-term process and although trends were positive between 1999 and 2001, there is a need to continue to monitor institutional performance over the coming years, in order to build up a series of institutional "snapshots". By December 2001, near the end of the Project, NGO support for institutional strengthening phased out in all FUGs/CDGs except those in the Upper Slopes test site, while regular DFO and DSCO support continued. It is recommended that the future phase of the Project continue to measure institutional performance in the same FUGs/CDGs, using the same methodology, and that in some years from now firmer conclusions about institutional strengthening in these groups are drawn.