Singh, H.B.

Community forestry requires field staff to enter into a partnership with forest users. However, field staff often find it difficult to adjust to a "people centred" approach when they have been used to a more traditional role involving policy functions. Furthermore, their traditional role has not equipped them with the skills needed for implementing community forestry. Therefore, training programmes in community forestry need to be designed to facilitate the partnership with forest users.

Participatory mapping is used as a way of collecting complex socio- economic and bio-physical data needed to understand the relationships between farming and forests. This has been used in Nepal where there is little other information available to fieldworkers. boundaries, features and uses of forests can be recorded, although field workers have a tendency to construct sketch maps themselves with little consultation with villagers. Participatory mapping overcomes the problem of fieldworker bias and allows a much greater amount of information to be portrayed on the map.